The song is also the creative foundation for her later claim to songwriter royalties as part of the divorce settlement. She had written something. She had established a creative identity separate from the performance identity. When the settlement came to be negotiated, the songwriter royalties for “Nutbush City Limits” and other songs she had written were real assets with real commercial value. She kept them.
The decision to retain songwriter royalties rather than fight for a larger share of the studio or the real estate reflected an understanding of where her long-term interests lay: in the recurring revenue of songs that continued to generate income as long as they were performed or covered or licensed. Real estate is worth what it sells for once. A song generates revenue every time it plays. The songwriter who owns the publishing rights participates in that revenue stream indefinitely.
Tina Turner understood this. She had been in the music business since 1958. She had watched how money moved in the industry, even when she wasn’t the one controlling how it moved. When she left, she kept the rights that would continue to produce income. The name was one of those things. The songwriter royalties were another.
## The Australian Connection: Building the Base Before the Comeback
Before Roger Davies and Capitol Records, before Terry Britten and “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” before the Grammy sweep of 1985, there was Australia.
Tina Turner’s Australian following in the late 1970s and early 1980s is one of the underappreciated elements of the comeback story, because it represents a real audience that maintained a connection with her work during the years when the American music industry had largely moved on. Davies, who is Australian, recognized what he was seeing: a performer with genuine fanbase loyalty in a market where she had built real credibility, who could be the basis for a more systematic rebuild.