Turner, Ike; and Turner, Tina

original names Izear Luster Turner, Jr. , and Anna Mae Bullock

(born Nov. 5, 1931, Clarksdale, Miss., U.S.) (born Nov. 26, 1939, Brownsville, Tenn.) American rhythm-and-blues and soul performers whose revue was popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Ike Turner began playing piano as a child and by the late 1940s had played with a number of the leading blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta region. While in high school he formed a band, the Kings of Rhythm. Their first record, “Rocket 88”—recorded at Sam Phillips's Memphis (Tennessee) Recording Service but released on the Chess label—was a number one rhythm-and-blues hit in 1951, though it was credited to saxophonist Jackie Brenston (who provided the lead vocal) and the Delta Cats. After Brenston's departure Ike served as a talent scout in the Memphis region for Los Angeles-based Modern Records and played as a session musician on early recordings by Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, and others.

In St. Louis, Missouri, where Ike had relocated in 1956, he expanded a new lineup of the Kings of Rhythm to include Anna Mae Bullock, a vocalist who had begged to sing with the band. Rechristened Tina Turner, she married Ike in 1958, and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue thrived as a live act because of her fiery stage presence, a trio of female backing vocalists known as the Ikettes, and Ike's rubber-faced guitar-playing antics. Recording success eluded them, however, until the New York-based Sue label released a series of records—“Fool in Love” (1960), “I Idolize You” (1960), and “It's Gonna Work Out Fine” (1961)—that won them a national following. In 1966 Phil Spector made “River Deep, Mountain High” with Tina (he paid Ike to stay out of the studio). Easily the most complex and nuanced of Spector's famous wall-of-sound productions, it was a hit in Britain, but it attracted little American attention and is usually cited as the end of Spector's early career.

Repositioning themselves to appeal to the growing rock market in the late 1960s, Ike and Tina Turner began to sell records again with their energetic reworkings of other people's songs, most notably Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Proud Mary” (1971), which, along with “Nutbush City Limits” (1973), written by Tina, proved to be their last major success. Tina began to realize that she, not Ike, was the attraction, and, after appearing in the film Tommy (1975), she divorced Ike—alleging beatings, cocaine addiction, and infidelity on his part—and started over. With the help of a steamy tell-all autobiography, an Australian manager, and pop material written by European songwriters for her debut solo album, Private Dancer (1984), she became a major pop star. What's Love Got to Do with It?, a film based on her autobiography, was released in 1993. Ike's career was hurt by Tina's revelations, and, after imprisonment for cocaine possession, he undertook a comeback. Ike and Tina Turner were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Ed Ward