The specific qualities of Tina Turner’s voice have been analyzed across fifty years of reviews and profiles, and the analyses tend to cluster around the same qualities: an extraordinary lower register that could generate chest tones of unusual warmth and power, combined with a higher range that could produce a scream that didn’t break, a shout that stayed musical, a rasp that was controlled rather than accidental. The voice was not conventionally beautiful in the way that the pop industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s had decided “beautiful” meant. It was something more useful: it was expressive. Whatever emotion the song required, the voice could produce it with a specificity that the listener felt in the body.
Phil Spector, who was not a man given to easy enthusiasm about anyone else’s abilities, chose Tina Turner’s voice for “River Deep – Mountain High” in 1966. The choice was specific: Spector had built a production style — the Wall of Sound — that required a voice capable of cutting through layers of orchestration without losing texture or warmth. He had worked with some of the finest vocalists in popular music. He chose her. The recording that resulted was built to a scale that challenged the playback technology of its time, and the voice at its center was doing something that most voices in the business simply could not do.
The song failed commercially in the United States, which became one of the famous anomalies of mid-1960s pop music — a record that by almost every available measure was extraordinary, that reached number three in the United Kingdom, that the British music press received as a revelation, and that the American market did not respond to in the moment. The failure was attributed to various causes: the relationship between Spector and the disc jockeys who controlled radio play, the changing sound of American pop in the year of the British Invasion’s aftermath, simple commercial timing. Whatever the cause, the record’s American failure was not a failure of Tina Turner’s performance.