Tina Turner - 1939-2023

The best

Thank you for joining me for this Sunday Special commentary.

Comments and questions are welcome.

For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below.

(598 words)

Tina Turner - 1939-2023

I opened my Facebook app and saw a post from a friend:

“Tina, we’ll miss you.”

That was all it said. My heart sank. I knew who it was before scrolling down for more news. A legend passed away this week. Tina Turner.

For many people who are not familiar with who she was, as many of my students are, Tina Turner was a singer and a very special performer. You can find plenty of information about her on Internet and watch/listen to her songs on YouTube and other platforms.

It might seem strange to include her in Social Issues in Song because she never sang songs that dealt with social issues. The majority of her music was rhythm and blues, soul, and rock. Maybe the closest she came was through the song Nutbush City Limits.

The song deals with her hometown of Nutbush, Tennessee. She grew up in this small town during the era of Jim Crow, a system that separated races in the South and allowed racism to flourish from 1877 through the 1950s.

She was the daughter of a sharecropper, a farmer who rented land from the (almost always white) landowner but had to pay with about 50% of the crops they raised. Sharecroppers also had to pay for a small cabin, their tools, seeds, and other goods. It was very difficult for them to get out of the cycle of debt.

In the song, she sings about life in the “one-horse” (tiny) town, going to church on Sundays, picking cotton on her parents’ farm, and the “gin house” which was the building where the cotton fibers were separated from the seeds. You couldn’t sell whiskey, and if you were arrested, you wouldn’t get much to eat in jail. You had to be careful how you behaved.

The reason I am writing this article about her is that her life was the social issue. She was in an abusive relationship with her first husband and singing partner, Ike Turner. During the relationship, Tina became a follower of Buddhism. After 16 years of abuse and domestic violence, Tina left one night and never went back. She credited her belief with giving her the strength to leave.

Her career was rocky for a while, but in the 1980s, she made a comeback that relaunched her career and made her one of the best-selling singer/performers in music history, with fans around the world.

I was fortunate to have seen her in concert. It was in 1990, during her Foreign Affair: The Farewell Tour (video at the end of the article. I’m sitting, no, dancing along with the crowd, in the section just to the left of the stage. Can you see me?). She filled the entire Olympic Stadium in Barcelona. It was electric. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone with so much energy and scintillating personality in any concert I’ve been to.

She had this crane, like something on a fire truck, that reached out over the audience below. Just spectacular. This is my lasting memory of that concert:

Photo by: Harry Lawford, openverse.org

A message to my readers is, if you are in any kind of abusive relationship, value yourself enough to find help. Find a counselor or a good friend you can confide in. Get information about other supportive groups or organizations. Take care of yourself. If you’re in Japan, you can contact the TELL Lifeline (website: https://telljp.com/ or call the TELL Lifeline and Chat (Japanese or English at 03-5774-0992.

Thank you, Tina, for your courage, integrity, and inspiration and for providing us with 50 years of fabulous entertainment.

---

VOCABULARY

flourish 流行る

abusive 虐待的

comeback 戻ってくる

relaunch 再起動

fortunate 幸運な

scintillating きらきら光る

spectacular 素晴らしい

confide 打ち明ける

(Tina was 51 in this video.)