The decision drew some commentary in the American press. She was, after all, one of the defining figures of American popular music — a woman from Nutbush, Tennessee, who had carried the tradition of Black American R&B into arenas across the country and the world. Her decision to become Swiss was read by some as a rejection of the country that had given her both her career and her suffering. She did not frame it that way. She framed it as the choice of a person who had earned the right to choose where she lived.
The house in Küsnacht, which she shared with Bach, was not a celebrity compound or a performer’s tax shelter. It was a home — a place to be rather than a base from which to depart. She designed rooms in it, filled it with the art and objects of a life accumulated across decades of music and travel, and lived there with a quietness that stood in deliberate contrast to the decades of relentless public performance.
Her 2018 autobiography, My Love Story, is largely about this phase — the life with Bach, the health challenges that came in her seventies, the Swiss citizenship, the marriage, and the wish that the public narrative about her life would expand to include more than the story of what she had survived. She was very clear, in interviews connected to the book, that she had lived a full life that extended beyond the years with Ike Turner, and she wanted the cultural record to reflect that completeness.