She was also, in a way that is not secondary to the musical legacy but parallel to it, a person who survived something terrible and then lived a life that was more than what she survived. The career she built under the name Tina Turner after 1984 is a record of that life. The Erwin Bach years in Switzerland are a record of it too — the private peace of a life chosen rather than assigned, the marriage that came after twenty-seven years of courtship, the kidney and the gratitude and the quiet.
The 2021 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame solo induction placed a formal institutional stamp on what the records and the tours and the Grammys had established in commercial terms. The catalog sale in 2021 placed a dollar figure on it that, whatever the exact amount, represents the industry’s estimate of what the name has been worth in the long run.
Anna Mae Bullock was born in Nutbush, Tennessee, in 1939. She left a limousine in Dallas in 1976 with thirty-six cents. She went to London in 1983 and recorded a cover of an Al Green song with Martyn Ware. She jogged in place in a studio to find the groove of a song she didn’t initially connect with. She sang “What’s Love Got to Do with It” in a way that made it number one in four countries.
The name she fought for was the right to continue being, professionally, the person she had become — the performer who the Revue had built an audience for, whose voice audiences recognized, whose name on a marquee meant something to the people who would buy the ticket. The legal fight was for the right to use what she had already earned through sixteen years of performing.