Tina Turner

The American singer who turned a sharecropping childhood in Nutbush, Tennessee into the longest second act in popular music. Born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, she joined Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm in St. Louis in 1957 and spent the next two decades making some of the most explosive R&B and rock recordings of the era — A Fool in Love, River Deep – Mountain High, Proud Mary, Nutbush City Limits — until she left Ike in 1976 with thirty-six cents and a gas card to her name. The years that followed were lean. The reinvention, when it came, was total. Her fifth solo album Private Dancer in 1984 produced What's Love Got to Do with It, three Grammys, and a US number one at 44 — at that point the oldest woman to top the Hot 100 as a solo artist. Across the rest of the 1980s she released Break Every Rule, Foreign Affair, and a touring operation that culminated in a 1988 Rio de Janeiro stadium show in front of 180,000 paying ticket-holders, then a Guinness world record for any solo performer.

She released ten studio albums under her own name between 1974 and 1999, sold somewhere north of 100 million records, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice — with Ike in 1991, as a solo artist in 2021. She won twelve Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement honour, and was the first Black artist and the first woman ever to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. She retired from touring in 2009 after the Tina!: 50th Anniversary Tour, married her long-time partner Erwin Bach in 2013, took Swiss citizenship, and lived the rest of her life quietly in Küsnacht. She died on May 24, 2023, aged 83. The musical Tina opened in London in 2018 and is still running; the documentary Tina arrived in 2021. The Queen of Rock 'n' Roll is the name they gave her in her lifetime, and nothing has happened since to suggest the title needs revising.