Tragic Details About Tina Turner's Difficult Childhood

A statue of legendary rock star Tina Turner now stands in Brownsville, Tennessee, the city where she was born. She might be a hero in the area now, but it was a very different story while she was growing up in the nearby community of Nutbush. Turner, who died at the age of 83 on May 24, 2023, was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, and she did not exactly have the most stable childhood.

The youngest daughter of Floyd Richard Bullock and his wife Zelma Priscilla, Turner had two older sisters, Evelyn Juanita Currie and Ruby Alline Bullock. The girls became separated during World War II, as their parents moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, to work at a defense facility. Turner was sent to live with her deacon and deaconess grandparents during this time. Eventually the sisters reunited with their parents, but that relative stability did not last forever.

When Turner was just 11 years old, her mother suddenly left the family and relocated to St. Louis to escape abuse at the hands of her husband. Two years after that, Floyd remarried and moved to Detroit, leaving Turner and her sisters to move in with their maternal grandmother, Georgina Currie, in Brownsville. Sadly though, Georgina died when Turner was just 16. She then had no other choice but to move in with her mother in St. Louis. And that was not the only time that Turner lost a loved one when she was just a teenager. When she was 14, her sister Evelyn and her cousin Margaret Currie died in a car crash. (Another cousin, Vela Evans, was also in the vehicle but survived the accident.) But tragedy didn't ultimately define her future.

Tina Turner knew she was dealt a bad hand in life, but she did not let it grind her down. When looking back on her childhood with adult eyes, she was clear-eyed about the struggles she endured. As she wrote in her autobiography "I, Tina," "The fact is, I had no love from my mother or my father from the beginning, from birth. But I survived." She also intimated that her arrival may have spurred on the dissolution of her parents' marriage, even though it wasn't exactly on solid ground beforehand. As she bluntly wrote, "When my mother all of a sudden became pregnant with me ... well, today it would be abortion time, I think."

Unfortunately, abuse followed Tina into adulthood after she met Ike Turner, her former musical partner to whom she was married from 1962 to 1978. Tina's mistreatment at Ike's hand has been widely documented, but she eventually broke free and launched a successful solo career.

During a 2005 interview with Oprah Winfrey for O, The Oprah Magazine, Winfrey asked Tina what she learned from that time in her life. She responded, "I have to depend on myself. When you stay in a situation like that, you're trapped in negative energy. I believe that if you'll just stand up and go, life will open up for you. Something just motivates you to keep moving [...] I was shaken, nervous, scared. But I knew I wasn't going back." Tina endured many struggles that could have held her back, but instead, her resilience and independence allowed her to live a remarkably transformative life until the very end.