Two Words

She sold her recorded-music and publishing rights to BMG in October 2021 for a reported fifty million dollars, sixty-one years after a man in a St. Louis studio gave her the name they were filed under. She died at home in May 2023, aged eighty-three. No cause has been made public, and this book does not supply one.

Working back from there produces a life better told as an acquisition than as an escape. In March 1960 Ike Turner had paid for a room at Technisonic Studios and the singer the song was written for did not come, so he put the twenty-year-old singing backup in front of the microphone: Anna Mae Bullock, a nurse's aide at Barnes hospital with a nineteen-month-old son at home. Within weeks he had given her a stage name, picked because Tina rhymed with Sheena, off a jungle-queen serial, and registered it, so that if the woman singing under it walked out he could hire another woman to be her. No registration number has ever been produced. She left a Dallas hotel on July 1, 1976, having waited until her husband was asleep. In the decree final on March 29, 1978 she surrendered her share of Bolic Sound, the publishing companies and the real estate, took responsibility for the canceled dates and an IRS lien, and kept two Jaguars, her furs, her jewelry and her stage name. She was thirty-eight. She had bought a trademark and paid for it with a catalog.

Half the book takes place after that night, and a good deal of it is not flattering: food stamps for nearly two years, a misdemeanor charge in Beverly Hills, Hollywood Squares, two failed albums, and five weeks in apartheid South Africa in 1979, the one decision she never reopened. Then Private Dancer, ten million copies, and at forty-four the only American number one of her life. It ends in Haywood County, Tennessee, at a one-room schoolhouse reassembled in Brownsville as the Tina Turner Museum. The name on the building is her family's. The name on the exhibit inside is the trademark.