Ike Turner is dead and nearly everything about his life is in dispute, except his talent. He died on 12 December 2007, properly reviled as one of society's most famous wife‐beaters, yet wrongly forgotten as one of its greatest musical innovators. Both of these aspects of Ike's complex, chaotic, and tormented 70+ years on earth have something to teach us, not only about Ike, but also about the rest of us who either condemn or admire him without reckoning with the vexed contradictions and conditions that shaped his life and deeds.
It is not easy to see Ike Turner in a sympathetic way. By his own admission, he spent some eleven million dollars over the course of his life on cocaine. He served several stints in prison for drug offenses. Although Ike denied “beating” his wives (as many as thirteen of them by some counts), he freely admitted “hitting” them. He punched Howlin' Wolf and reportedly shot at a newspaper delivery boy who made the mistake of leaving the evening paper in a place on the porch that did not meet with Ike's approval. Turner insisted on receiving a full writer's credit on Tina Turner's recording of “River Deep, Mountain High,” even though he had nothing to do with writing or recording the song. Ike kept for himself the royalties that the Ikettes earned on a series of records he produced. When the Ikettes tried to salvage something from their hits by going on tour to perform them, Ike stopped them from using the Ikettes name, which he had copyrighted, forcing them to tour (unsuccessfully) as the Mirettes.
Ike Turner's name became synonymous with wife‐beating at the precise historical moment when decades of feminist mobilization finally succeeded in giving domestic abuse the stigma it deserves. As one of the most widely recognized symbols of the indecency of gendered familial violence, his shaming served positive social purposes, making him surely one of the most unlikely and most unexpected contributors to women's rights and human rights ever. Yet he never seemed to understand the reasons for his obloquy and disgrace, never expressed remorse for things that he had done.
Tina Turner's 1986 autobiography I, Tina disclosed repeated incidents of domestic abuse by Ike Turner. The man who profited most from Tina's artistry as a vocalist on stage routinely assaulted her off stage. She reports him striking her with a shoe stretcher, sticking a cigarette all the way up her nose, and beating her repeatedly. In that book and elsewhere, associates of the couple report repeated sightings of Tina with a bloody nose, swollen eyes, or bruises all over her body. The fine performances delivered by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne in the 1993 film version of her story, What's Love Got to Do with It, made indelible impressions of Ike's villainy and Tina's virtue for millions of people. Probably no single case has ever done as much to foreground the problem of domestic abuse or mobilize public opinion against it.
Yet while people were and are absolutely correct to condemn Ike Turner's assaults against Tina and the other women he professed to love, we have to ask if the public outcry would have been the same if Ike Turner had been white, and if Tina had not left rhythm and blues music for pop music and embraced the producers and musical forms most pleasing to white audiences. In I, Tina, not only Ike, but all blacks (including Tina's mother) seem to stand in the way of her dreams. White promoters, producers, musicians, and even fashion designers, on the other hand, are universally receptive and helpful to her. One wonders if Tina would have become the same kind of icon for the public if her autobiography had not been ghosted by Rolling Stone writer, military journalist, and right‐wing libertarian Kurt Loder or if Tina had not claimed in the book that she was black only in this life—that she had been reincarnated from a previous lifetime where she was surely a French woman—and if she had not asserted in it that she had gone beyond black and white and was now “universal.”
Ike's skin color, class background, and style account for some of his prominence as a villain. We know that domestic abuse takes place among people of all races and classes. Yet the image of the brutal black male “buck” dates back to the post‐bellum period when whites wanted to use stories about black misbehavior as an excuse to regain control over the lives and labor of a formerly enslaved population. White men who seem completely unable to find sexism and misogyny in their own ranks can become quite exercised about the mistreatment of women when they perceive black males as perpetrators. Producer Phil Spector's abuse of his mixed‐race wife Ronnie Bennett was well documented in her autobiography Be My Baby, yet, in contrast to I, Tina, it produced absolutely no public outcry. In a case that is still pending after a first trial ended in a hung jury, Spector has been charged with the murder of Lana Clarkson. Witnesses at the trial testified that he had pointed guns at women with whom he was involved in the past. Yet, even when Spector delivered a eulogy at Ike Turner's funeral, few people associated him with the kinds of behavior for which Ike had been rightly condemned.
There is something wrong with reducing a pervasive and serious social problem like domestic violence to the personal shortcomings of its best‐known black male perpetrator without questioning the broader social, economic, and legal structures that make domestic violence seem legitimate and satisfying to alarming numbers of men of all races and classes. In addition, while Turner's behavior was certainly inexcusable, it was not incomprehensible or inexplicable given his own life history and the depths of misogyny in this society.
Turner was born Ike Wister Turner on 5 November 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. One day, when he was a small child, a mob of white vigilantes broke into the Turner family's little house, blindfolded Ike's father (Izear Luster Turner), and spirited him away. When they returned, they dumped his body in the family's yard. Izear had been so badly beaten that he needed hospitalization, but the medical authorities in segregated Clarksdale did not treat black patients. Consequently, the Board of Health erected a tent in the Turner's yard, where Izsear languished for several years until he finally died from his injuries.
Ike was raised by his mother, a seamstress. She taught him to hem slipcovers at an early age. He might have become a tailor, but music captured him quickly. Ike learned to play piano by imitating Pine Top Perkins. He soon mastered the guitar as well. As a teenager, he provided piano accompaniment for Sonny Boy Williamson's singing and harmonica playing, and he backed up B. B. King on guitar. King once called Ike the best band leader he had ever seen. As a young adult, Turner would produce one of King's classic blues recordings, “Three O'Clock Blues.” Ike formed the band that recorded what is generally considered to be the first real rock and roll record, “Rocket 88.” As a talent scout, he led Joe Bihari to record Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, among many others.
Ike's road to success entailed enormous struggle. When he played with his first band in Clarksdale, he was so poor that if he broke one of the strings on his piano he had to find a discarded automobile tire, melt it down, and remove the steel in its treads to get a replacement. When his saxophone players needed new pads for their keys, Ike cut up pieces of chamois cloth and glued them onto the instrument himself. He played in swing bands and rhythm and blues groups, worked as a radio disc jockey, and even sang in an a cappella vocal group. Playing piano in a trio with guitarist Robert Nighthawk, Turner found himself working at juke joints where he was expected to play for twelve hours straight—from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.—with no intermission and no breaks. If a member of the group paused to use the rest room, one of the others would have to fill in. As a result, Ike learned to play guitar and drums as well as piano.
Clarksdale had no real music industry, but Memphis—some seventy‐five miles away—did. Ike did not own an automobile. He peddled his bicycle seventy‐five miles each way just so he could hang out in Memphis recording studios and clubs, hoping to pick up pointers, if not jobs. His group's recording of “Rocket 88” sold half a million copies, but Ike and other members of the band received only twenty dollars each for their creation. Even worse, producer Sam Phillips released the song under the name of the song's vocalist, Jackie Brenston, rather than as a recording by Ike's Kings of Rhythm. Fans who bought the record did not know that Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats did not actually exist, and that Sam Phillips had made up the name and credited the recording to Brenston because he thought he would have more control over the group's future outings that way than he would with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm.
Ike brought his group to East St. Louis, Illinois, where he became part of that city's thriving blues scene. Chuck Berry, Johnnie Johnson, Albert King, and Little Milton all lived and worked in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Tina Turner (then Annie Mae Bullock) attended Sumner High School. Her classmates included Alvin Cash, later leader of Alvin Cash and the Crawlers; Billy Davis, who went on to sing with the Fifth Dimension; and Luther Ingram, who placed twenty songs (including “If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right”) on the rhythm and blues best‐seller charts. Blacks in St. Louis struggled with systemic job discrimination that relegated them to low‐wage dangerous jobs in packing houses and factories and with relentless residential segregation that confined them to overcrowded, unsanitary, and brutally policed ghettos. For many years, black police officers in St. Louis could not arrest any whites, but instead had to limit their police actions to other blacks. Careers in music might have seemed like pathways out of these oppressive conditions, but Ike Turner and others soon discovered that the music business contained all the injustices and inequalities characteristic of the rest of society.
Ike's band went on the road fifty‐one weeks a year. He learned to collect his money before the intermission because often after the show had ended the owners and promoters disappeared, pocketing all the proceeds from that night themselves. Even then, Ike had to be careful where he kept the money they paid him during the second half of the show because the people who paid him sometimes stole the money back. He found that he had to carry a gun to get paid, and he had to demonstrate his willingness to use it to make the threat credible. He did all his work under difficult circumstances, recording one album (A Black Man's Soul) in separate sessions in Washington, DC, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles while on tour.
Yet, in the midst of all this, Ike Turner created great art. He wrote memorable songs, produced and arranged magnificent records, and created and choreographed one of the most entertaining stage shows ever featuring Tina and the Ikettes. His recorded music holds up magnificently after all this time—not just the big hits by Ike and Tina Turner like “It's Gonna Work Out Fine,” “A Fool in Love,” and “Proud Mary,” but also cuts on obscure albums like “Thinking Black,” “Prancin,’” and “I'm Going Back Home.” Like Prince, Turner was a virtuoso on both guitar and piano, but his main instrument was the ensemble. Like Johnny Otis, he made lasting contributions to black music as a recording artist, but also distinguished himself as a talent scout, arranger, producer, and promoter.
Yet Ike Turner will be remembered mostly for his drug use, indiscriminate sexual history, and episodes of domestic violence. There is some justice in this and some positive social purposes are served by it. But making Ike Turner into an object of ridicule does too little to challenge how and why domestic violence happens. It evades the many cruelties of raced, classed, and gendered power that hurt people, and in turn make them want to hurt others. It ignores the ways in which the commodification and trivialization of sexual desire pervade our culture. It avoids asking how and why humiliation and degradation become connected to sexual titillation in books, motion pictures, advertising, and television programs. It relieves us of the responsibility to examine our society's affective and intellectual allegiances to aggression, to question our apparent belief that violence, war, brutality, and even torture are legitimate and appropriate solutions to the problems we face.
It is not easy to determine what is true and what is untrue about Ike Turner. He told many different stories about his life, many of which directly contradict one another. A celebrity is a person who has become a product. His or her story has a cash value. Ike and his admirers have a stake in the story that emphasizes his artistry and generosity. Tina and her supporters are invested in accounts that underscore Ike's villainy and violence. The large numbers of people who make their livelihood from the sales of music, motion pictures, books, and fashion have their own stakes in how Ike Turner's story is told. In public circulation, accounts of his life can support principled projects aimed at ending domestic violence, but can also fuel despicable slurs designed to blame the culture and character of individual black people for their collective social subordination by white supremacy. Some of Ike's defenders may secretly support brutality against women; some of his attackers may secretly support white supremacy.
Many of the white men who feel comfortable condemning Ike Turner's sexism and misogyny might be less comfortable acknowledging that their sympathy for Tina is mingled with lust for her. It might cause them some conflict to know that Ike orchestrated Tina's on‐stage look, that her scanty costumes and long straight hair came from a fantasy that Ike designed in homage to his own sexual titillation by the Sheena of the Jungle movies that he viewed in Clarksdale Theatres in the 1940s. These men might find they have more in common with Ike than their righteous condemnations of him acknowledge.
Moreover, nearly all music fans have emotional attachments to fantasies about the music we like and the industry that produces it. We imagine that we find in music a liberated zone free of the cruelties and corruptions we experience elsewhere, when in fact the music industry is one of the prime producers of those vices.
It would help to have a thorough, well researched, and insightful biography of Ike Tuner. Such a book would delineate the violent and vile nature of white supremacy in the Clarksdale, Memphis, and East St. Louis that Ike inhabited. It would locate his psycho‐sexual perversions in the context of our society's routine and pervasive misogyny, our seeming inability to combine sex‐affirmative pleasurable sexuality with mutual respect and dignity. Such a book would explore the life of Kings of Rhythm members like Clayton Love who grew up with Ike and went on to become a distinguished educator in the St. Louis school system while remaining a virtuoso pianist. It would draw on evidence from Fontella Bass, Chuck Berry, Billy Peek, and other eyewitnesses to Turner's years in East St. Louis. It would explain and critique domestic abuse without succumbing to once again promoting a story about black women in need of rescue by white men. Yet even a perfect book cannot make this story come out without rough edges, hard facts, and discomforting realities. If, even after his death, nearly everything about Ike Turner's life remains in dispute, perhaps it is not because we know too little about him. It is because we know too little about ourselves.
Related Research Data
