How Tina Turner’s Humble Tenn. Beginnings Helped Steer Her to Stardom

Tina Turner may have been made for superstardom, but Anna Mae Bullock’s origins were slightly less glamorous.

Turner, who died on May 24 at age 83 following a long illness, was born Anna Mae to Zelma and Floyd Bullock in in rural Tennessee in 1939.

Her parents were farmers, and young Anna Mae and her older sister Alline would help by working in the cotton fields.

Though Turner found happiness singing in the choir at Spring Hill Baptist Church in Nutbush, things are home were difficult; Floyd was abusive to his wife, and Turner and her mother’s relationship was distant.

“My mother didn’t love me; it was as simple as that,” the singer told Scotland’s Daily Record in 1999. “Even when I was a little girl, I knew she didn’t love me.”

When Turner was 11, Zelma left the family and moved to St. Louis, cutting off contact with both her husband and her daughters. After Floyd remarried and moved to Detroit, Turner and Alline were left in the care of relatives — and eventually reunited with Zelma in St. Louis after the death of their grandmother in 1955.

For the “Proud Mary” singer, St. Louis wound up being a serendipitous twist of fate, as it was at the city’s Club Manhattan that she first met future husband and collaborator Ike Turner at 17.

“I couldn’t help thinking, ‘God, he’s ugly,'” she wrote in her 2018 memoir My Love Story. “[But] he really had something when he came out onstage and lit it up. People just went crazy. Like me. That’s who I responded to that first night, a great guitarist playing the most exciting music, music that made me want to burst into song and dance.”

Though she initially was just a spectator, she was plucked one night from the crowd to sing onstage. Turner wowed with B.B. King’s “You Know I Love You,” and before long, Ike had hired her to be a featured singer with his Kings of Rhythm band.

And the rest, as they say, is history.