The problem was practical and commercial: the record was going to be released, the voice was striking, and it needed a name. Ike Turner came up with Tina. The name was derived, by accounts he later gave, from Sheena — specifically from the television character Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, which he watched regularly. Tina rhymed with Sheena and had a similar sound. He added his own last name and created a marquee identity: Tina Turner.
She had no say in it. She didn’t choose it. The name was given to her by someone who was simultaneously her musical director, romantic partner, and — in the structure of the recording industry as it worked around them — her employer.
There is a business dimension to the naming that Ike Turner was explicit about in later accounts. He trademarked the name “Tina Turner.” He did this, by his own stated reasoning, because he had been burned before by losing a singer — had invested in building an act around a performer who then walked away. The trademark was protection. If Tina Turner was going to be a commercial product, he was going to own the product.
The irony of this protection scheme — the fact that the instrument of his attempted commercial control over her became the thing she most valuably retained when she left him — is one of the specific darknesses in the story.
“A Fool in Love” was released in July 1960. It reached number two on the Hot R&B Sides chart and number twenty-seven on the Billboard Hot 100. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was launched as a commercial enterprise. The name was out in the world.