Tina Turner sold more concert tickets than any other solo performer in history, had her legs insured by Lloyd’s of London, and filled arenas worldwide with a voice that defined an era. But behind that towering public success were two marriages—one that nearly destroyed her, and one that, after decades of waiting, finally gave her the peace she had earned. Before she was Tina Turner, she was Anna Mae Bullock, born on November 26th, 1939, in Nutbush, Tennessee. Her father, Floyd Bullock, was a sharecropper, and her mother, Zelma Currie, worked alongside him.
The family lived in a small house on the farm property, part of the sharecropping system that shaped Black rural life in the mid-South during those decades. When Anna Mae was still a young child, both parents left. They each moved away to build separate lives, leaving Anna Mae and her older sister Alline to be raised by their maternal grandmother, Georgie Currie. The abandonment became the foundational wound of Tina Turner’s emotional life, a subject she addressed directly in her memoirs and interviews without ever explaining it away.
After her grandmother died, Anna Mae went to live with her mother in St. Louis, Missouri. The move placed her in one of the most musically fertile cities in America. The rhythm and blues clubs of St.
Louis in the mid-1950s were alive with sounds transforming American music, and Anna Mae, who had grown up singing in church, was immediately drawn to them. It was in one of those clubs that she encountered a man who would both make her and nearly destroy her: Izear Luster Turner Jr. , known to everyone as Ike Turner. He was already a significant figure in the music world, considered by many historians to be one of the architects of rock and roll.
His 1951 recording “Rocket 88,” credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, is widely regarded as among the earliest recognizable rock and roll records. Ike was 25 when Anna Mae Bullock first encountered him at Club Manhattan around 1957. She was 17, still in high school. She had been watching the Kings of Rhythm perform before she ever spoke to Ike, going with her sister Alline to hear the band.
One night, during a break in the set, someone handed the microphone to Anna Mae. What came out of her stopped everyone in the room. Ike recognized immediately what he had heard and invited her to join the band. She accepted, beginning a professional relationship that would gradually consume every other aspect of her life.
The early years of their working relationship were not romantic. Ike was involved with a woman named Lorraine Taylor, with whom he had two sons. Anna Mae performed with the band, becoming increasingly central to their sound, and living in the orbit of a man she both admired professionally and was beginning to fear. The shift from professional to personal happened around 1960, when Ike began a relationship with Anna Mae while still with Lorraine Taylor.
Tina’s own account of how that began emphasized the power imbalance. She was living under his roof, dependent on the band for income and housing, in a situation where the line between encouragement and coercion was deliberately kept unclear. She had already given birth to a son, Craig Raymond Turner, in 1958, fathered by the band’s saxophonist, Raymond Hill. Ike eventually adopted Craig.
She was an 18-year-old single mother, entirely dependent on Ike’s professional infrastructure. In 1960, they recorded their first hit together, “A Fool in Love,” which reached the top five on the R&B charts. That same year, Ike renamed her. He decided Anna Mae Bullock should instead be called Tina, taken from a character in a jungle comic book, with Turner matching his own name.
She accepted this too. Their biological son together, Ronnie Turner, was born in October 1960. They married in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962. Tina wrote in her memoir that she felt she had very little choice in the matter—that Ike had decided they would marry, and declining was not something she felt she could do.
What followed across the next 16 years was a career of remarkable achievement conducted alongside a private life of sustained terror. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue became one of the most celebrated live acts in American music. They toured constantly, sometimes 300 dates a year, playing clubs, ballrooms, theaters, and eventually arenas. They opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1969 North American tour.
Mick Jagger has said openly that he learned his stage presence from watching Tina. Keith Richards described first seeing her perform as one of the formative shocks of his musical life. The hits accumulated through the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Proud Mary,” their transformation of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, reached number four on the pop charts in 1971 and earned them a Grammy Award.
Tina’s spoken introduction to the song—describing how they always did things nice and easy before going nice and rough—became one of the most famous passages in live performance history. For all of that success, Tina was receiving $25 a week in what Ike called pocket money. He controlled every other financial arrangement connected to the act. She signed whatever he put in front of her, and for years did not fully understand the extent to which she had signed away rights to her own name, recordings, and earning capacity.
Behind the scenes, the violence was escalating. Tina spoke publicly about what happened inside her marriage in her 1986 autobiography “I, Tina,” written with Kurt Loder, and again in her 2018 memoir “My Love Story. ” She described it in specific, documented terms—not to seek sympathy, she was clear, but because she believed telling the truth might help others in similar situations. The first incident of physical harm came early in the relationship, before the marriage.
He struck her with a wooden shoe stretcher. She described the shock of it, and the way she decided in that moment to stay rather than go, because she didn’t know what leaving would look like or whether she would survive it. The pattern that followed was one that experts on abusive relationships have since described as textbook in its structure. Periods of relative calm followed the worst incidents.
Gifts and gestures came afterward. The professional bonds created what felt like a shared purpose. And there was consistent, deliberate fear. He broke her jaw.
He used her nose as a punching bag, she wrote, so many times that she could taste blood running down her throat when she sang. He threw hot coffee at her, causing burns. He would strike her on the head specifically, she noted, because he played guitar and knew not to damage his hands. The physical harm happened before performances, after performances, in hotels, on tour buses, in their home.
The revue kept moving, and the violence moved with it. Audiences who screamed at what Tina delivered on stage every night had no idea what she carried when she walked off. In her memoirs, she described reaching her lowest point. She obtained sleeping pills from a doctor, describing insomnia as the reason.
At home, she took all 50 of them at once. She wrote that she was unhappy when she woke up, that she had genuinely wanted not to be alive in that moment. But she survived, and she came out of that darkness with a belief that she was meant to survive. The Buddhist practices she had been introduced to by a friend in the early 1970s became increasingly important after that night.
The chanting connected to Nichiren Buddhism gave her a private interior resource that Ike could not reach or control. She described it as the thing that saved her. The final violent incident happened on July 1st, 1976, in a limousine on the way from Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to a Dallas hotel. They had been arguing before they even reached the car.
On the highway to the hotel, Ike attacked her in the back of the limousine. She fought back this time, which she had not always done before. She arrived at the Statler Hilton Hotel with a swollen and bleeding face. Instead of going to the room she was expected to share with Ike, she walked out of the hotel, crossed the highway on foot, and walked into the Ramada Inn across the road.
She had 36 cents in her pocket. No credit cards. No cash beyond those coins. No identification of practical significance.
The Ramada Inn clerk gave her a room. She called a friend and business associate named Nate Turner, who wired her money and began making calls on her behalf. She stayed hidden, careful and afraid, and absolutely certain she was not going back. She filed for divorce later that year, citing irreconcilable differences.
The divorce was finalized in March 1978. Tina was willing to give up virtually everything the review had generated—rights to recordings, publishing rights, financial assets. She kept two things: the name Tina Turner and the right to tell her own story in her own voice. Ike reportedly let her keep the name, partly because he didn’t believe she could do anything significant with it without him.
That calculation was wrong. The years between 1978 and 1984 were difficult. She performed wherever she could book herself—Las Vegas lounges, small supper clubs. She had debts from the review era that were now her individual obligation.
The music industry of the late 1970s and early 1980s was not organized around second chances for middle-aged Black women. She continued her Buddhist practice, chanting every morning and evening. She described it as the method by which she sustained belief in her own future during years when almost no external evidence supported that belief. Roger Davies, an Australian music manager, agreed to manage her in 1980.
He was the first person in years who looked at her and saw not a comeback act but a star. In 1983, she recorded a cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” which became a hit in the UK and Europe. Capital Records in the US paid attention. The result was the album “Private Dancer,” released in May 1984.
It sold 12 million copies worldwide. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, her first number one solo hit. She was 44 years old. She won four Grammy Awards at the February 1985 ceremony, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
She appeared on the cover of virtually every major music publication in America and Europe simultaneously. She had arrived at the biggest moment of her professional life—and she was alone. The next chapter began at an airport in Germany. In 1986, she arrived at Düsseldorf Airport on a European promotional tour.
Her European record label sent a representative to meet her. His name was Erwin Bach. He was 30 years old, 16 years younger than Tina, who was 46. He was German, quiet, self-possessed, and completely unprepared for what meeting Tina Turner in person was going to do to him.
She was equally unprepared. She described noticing him before she knew who he was or why he was there. They did not begin dating immediately. Tina was cautious in ways that her history made entirely reasonable.
They became friends first, seeing each other when professional schedules created opportunities. Gradually and deliberately, the friendship became something else. Tina wrote about falling in love with Erwin Bach as an experience unlike anything she had previously known. Not the entanglement and dependency of the relationship with Ike.
Something mutual and quiet and real. He wanted nothing from her professionally. He had his own career and his own standing. He was, she said, the first man who had ever truly seen the woman underneath everything else.
They dated for 23 years before they married. The length of that courtship was not indecision—it was Tina making absolutely sure. She had one marriage behind her that had taken nearly everything. She was not going to formalize anything until she was completely certain.
Erwin Bach was born on January 24th, 1956, in Cologne, Germany. He built a career in the music industry, eventually rising to a senior executive position at EMI Music. He was accomplished on his own terms. They built a life in Küsnacht, Switzerland, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Zurich.
Tina had fallen in love with Europe during her comeback years, and specifically with the quality of life in Switzerland. She became a Swiss resident in 1994 and renounced her American citizenship in 2013. They married on July 21st, 2013, at their home in Küsnacht. She was 73.
He was 57. They had been together for 27 years. The ceremony was private. Photographs from that day showed a woman who looked simply and unmistakably happy.
In 2009, Tina retired from live touring following her “Tina! ” 50th anniversary tour. In 2012, she had a stroke. In 2016, she was diagnosed with intestinal cancer.
In 2017, her kidney function began failing, a condition her doctors attributed in part to long-term use of blood pressure medication. That year, Erwin donated one of his kidneys to save her life. Tina described it as the defining act of the marriage—the most complete expression of commitment one person can make toward another. He did it because he loved her.
She recovered, and they continued their life in Küsnacht. In December 2022, Tina’s son Ronnie died from complications of colon cancer at age 62. It was the second time she had lost a son. Her eldest, Craig, had died in July 2018 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 59.
Tina Turner died on May 24th, 2023, at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, after a long illness. She was 83. Erwin was beside her. The two marriages of Tina Turner are, in the end, a story about what a person can survive and what a person deserves.
The first marriage was not freely chosen. It was maintained through fear. She stayed for 16 years because the practical architecture of her life had been constructed to make leaving seem impossible. She left with 36 cents and walked across a highway.
The second marriage was the reward that the first made her capable of receiving—not because suffering earns love, but because the person she became through years of interior work knew exactly what she needed and was not willing to settle for less. Erwin gave her peace and quiet, and the specific gift of being loved for who she actually was. Tina Turner spoke in the final years of her life about peace.
Not the peace of someone who had erased what happened, but the peace of someone who had decided that what had been done to her was not going to define what she became.