Donald Brackett - Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner

T he author wishes to thank the many people who helped make this book possible and to express his appreciation to Aaron Cohen, John Corcelli, and James Porter for sharing their insights into Tina and her music. Thanks also to my musical friends, Gerry Watson and Kevin Courrier, for ongoing and fruitful discussions over the years. And to my partner, Dr. Mimi Gellman, for allowing me to spend so much time with amazing women like Tina.

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Physical strength in a woman, thats what I am. If youre unhappy with anything, get rid of it. When youre free, then your true creativity and true self comes out.

Tina Turner, in I Tina, 1986

O ne of Tina Turners lesser-known records is also one of her most important and revealing. Nutbush City Limits is a song released in 1973 as a single and on an album of the same name while she was still working with her partner and producer, Ike Turner. Its not her most beloved record or even her most popular song. It was, however, a crucial turning point, one we could even call a Turner Point since it was the first song she wrote by herself, for herself, and about herself. It was one that became quite a big hit for the prolific pair, who by that time had already been successful and revered for more than a decade but who were still only three years away from her divorce and hard-won independence.

It was also a song of deep intimacy, sentiment, and personal nostalgia in which she celebrated her rural roots in a frank and honest manner so meaningful for her that she would release different updated versions of it again and again over the years, notably a live recording in 1988 and several dance remixes in 1991 and yet another rerecording in 1993, long after she had become a stellar solo performer and a megastar in her own right. This raucously danceable ditty clearly had special meaning for her. The hidden truth behind the song was also of course the simple fact that it was always her who made the couples music special right from the beginning, a fact that must have grated severely on her insecure and volatile husband.

This relatively elementary little tune was almost a private kind of national anthem for the sleepy town of Nutbush, Tennessee, a place hardly anyone knew existed apart from the roughly 258 other souls besides Anna Mae Bullock, the future Tina, who lived there. But the song is also elemental in the way it situates her origins and embeds them in a manner that would never quite leave her, no matter how much fame or wealth tumbled her way. Distant from Interstate 40, dropped by an obviously ironic creator in the middle of nowhere between Jackson and Memphis, it was close enough to Highway 19 to make that the escape route for every bored citizen wanting out in search of wider and freer horizons.

This humble song extols and elevates, even mythologizes, a space and time forever lodged in the heart of a southern girl like Miss Bullock. And though basic in its fondly recalled message of home and hearth, Go to the store on Fridays, go to the church on Sundays... , it is nevertheless propelled along in a full-charging way as fueled by Ikes admittedly swift arrangements and his own powerful throbbing electric organ and twanging guitar playing, both coupled with their Kings of Rhythms customary swaying swagger.