Song of the Day 5/25: Ike & Tina Turner, “Proud Mary”

On her final visit to the United States in 2019 for the opening of a musical about her life, Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at 83, reflected on how far she had come. Despite her fame and fortune, “It wasn’t a good life,” she told an interviewer. “The good did not balance the bad.”

Anna Mae Bullock escaped a hardscrabble childhood while still a teen by forcing her way into Ike Turner’s band with her powerful vocals and ferocious stage presence. He treated her like an Oriental carpet — showed her off, walked all over her and beat her. She walked out in 1976 and, after some tough times, became an international star in the ’80s and even did some acting. She transcended music in the ’90s with her autobiography, which revealed the horrors of her marriage and turned her into an icon for battered women in a sort of precursor to the MeToo movement. She retired from performing live after her 50th-anniversary tour in 2009.

Though the death announcement gave no cause, Turner spoke a few years ago about her health problems, especially hypertension that led to kidney failure — hastened, she acknowledged, because she rejected prescription medication in favor of homeopathic remedies (her second husband eventually donated a kidney). She renounced her U.S. citizenship in 2013 so she could become a Swiss citizen, a requirement for purchasing property in the insular country.

Back when Ike and Tine were popular, nobody knew what was happening off-stage. Though she had many bigger hits in her solo career, this was the song that catapulted the Ike & Tina Turner Revue from the Chitlin’ Circuit to the mainstream. It was a No. 4 hit in 1971 and won a Grammy in 1972, but this Midnight Special performance is from 1973. I have no idea what the Ikette on the left is doing toward the end.