She was forty-five years old on Grammy night 1985. She had been performing professionally since 1958. The first Grammy she had received was for “Proud Mary” in 1972 — a group award, shared with Ike Turner. These four were individual recognitions, awarded to her solo career, under the name she had fought for in a Dallas divorce court seven years earlier.
The symbolism was not lost on anyone who followed the story. The name she had kept was the name that was on the Grammy trophies.
## The Kennedy Center and What Cultural Canonization Looks Like
The Kennedy Center Honors is a different kind of recognition from the Grammys, and Tina Turner’s reception of the Honors in 2005 placed her in a different cultural category from the one that commercial awards occupy.
The Kennedy Center Honors recognize lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts. The honorees in any given year come from across the performing arts — theater, classical music, dance, popular music — and the selection process is conducted by an institution that carries specific cultural authority as the nation’s center for the performing arts. Being honored at the Kennedy Center means being placed in a canon: American performers who have contributed to the culture in ways that are considered to be of lasting significance.
The 2005 Honors class that Tina Turner joined included Tony Bennett, Suzanne Farrell, Julie Harris, and Robert Redford. The breadth of the company — a jazz and pop singer, a ballet dancer, a theater actress, a film actor and director — reflects the Honors’ practice of recognizing artistic achievement across forms. The inclusion of Tina Turner in that company was a statement about where her contribution to American music had landed in the assessment of the people responsible for making such assessments.