Why Tina Turner Covered Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson on Her Debut Solo Album
A native of West Tennessee’s cotton-rich Haywood County, Tina Tuner was born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939 and would go on to become a household name in the Sixties and Seventies, performing alongside her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Ike Turner. Her extraordinary career would take her to the pop charts and around the world on tour, but Turner, who died Wednesday at age 83 at her home in Switzerland, could’ve wound up on a different trajectory with her first solo album.
In the same way that Ray Charles, the Supremes, and Bobby Womack had done before her, Turner recorded an album chiefly composed of country-music covers. But whereas the other artists showed their appreciation for country music later in their careers, Turner professed her love right out of the gate with her 1975 solo debut, Tina Turns the Country On!. The album was released a year before Turner filed for divorce from Ike, whose physical abuse, fueled by an increasing cocaine habit, led to the dissolution of their marriage and the end of their musical partnership.
With a title that was a clever play on Turner’s electrifying stage presence and also a nod to the country music contained therein, the LP featured songs from writers such as Dolly Parton (“There’ll Always Be Music,” which Parton recorded a year earlier with her one-time singing partner Porter Wagoner), Kris Kristofferson (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”), and Hank Snow (the prophetic “I’m Movin’ On”).
In spite of its country leanings — and less-than-stellar sales — the project did earn a 1975 Grammy nomination, for Best R&B Vocal Performance – Female. Turner would lose the Grammy to Aretha Franklin — which was hardly surprising since Franklin had won in the category every year since it was first introduced in 1968. But the roots of the album’s country-tinged cuts were embedded deep in the Brownsville, Tennessee, upbringing of Turner, who was raised in a four-room shotgun house in the sparsely populated Nut Bush community.
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Turner’s first childhood experience witnessing a live band was recalled in her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, which she penned with Kurt Loder. “It was just country music, picnic music not the blues or anything,” she wrote, with the band led by Mr. Bootsy Whitelaw, an itinerant trombone player who had made a name for himself as a performer in the area. Turner liked the sound and recalled stirring up the crowd at this particular performance with cries of “Come on, everybody, sing with Mr. Bootsy!”
It would take Turner almost a decade before she had a solo breakthrough with 1984’s Private Dancer, an LP that sold upwards of 20 million copies. Although Tina Turns the Country On! was her most overtly country-music effort, there are samplings of the genre spread sparingly throughout her solo work, with Turner applying her thrilling country-blues-rock approach to songs such as the Private Dancer-era B-side, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Widow,” the Tony Joe White-penned “Steamy Windows” (also cut by John Anderson), and even her gospel-inspired take on the Beatles’ “Help.”
These days, Turner’s humble country roots are on display in her hometown through its annual Tina Turner Heritage Days. In September 2014, the one-room Flagg Grove School she attended as a child was opened as a museum honoring her life and career. It is located on the grounds of the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center in Brownsville.
[A version of this story was first published in 2014.]