“Nutbush City Limits,” in 1973, was the first song Tina Turner wrote entirely on her own — a song about the specific social codes of the community she had grown up in. It was autobiographical in a direct way that her previous recordings hadn’t been. It reached number twenty-two on the Pop chart and number eleven on the R&B chart. In the context of everything that would follow, it also stands as evidence of a creative independence that the Revue’s structure hadn’t typically encouraged: she had written something, from her own life, and it had worked.
The public success of those years coexisted with private circumstances that Tina Turner did not publicly disclose until 1981. The abuse she described in her 1986 autobiography I, Tina and in subsequent interviews was not widely known during the years it was occurring. Audiences saw the Revue. They saw a performer who was visibly working at the highest level, bringing a physical and vocal intensity that was unmistakable. What they didn’t see was what was happening off stage, in the financial arrangements of the enterprise, in the control that Ike Turner exercised over the operation, and in the private dimensions of a marriage and working partnership that she eventually described as years of routine violence.
The specifics, when she eventually disclosed them, came from her own accounts. The pattern of abuse she described was long-standing and severe. She wrote in I, Tina that she couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a black eye.