What Tina Turner Taught Me

In one of the first scenes of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Anna Mae Bullock catches the Holy Ghost in her Baptist church. She’s a firecracker as commanding as the pastor. She hops out of her seat, dancing to the Word and the song “Nutbush City Limits.” Her mother pulls her down back to earth. Young Anna Mae is too big, too loud for Nutbush, where “you have to watch / what you’re puttin’ down.”

Soon, we see the dissolution of the young Southern girl’s family. She has always had a fraught and emotionally distant relationship with her mother, who became pregnant with Anna Mae unexpectedly. After her mother abruptly leaves Nutbush, Tennessee, to finally escape the abuse of her father, Anna Mae is raised by her maternal grandmother, Gran Georgeanna, through her teens.

Around this time, Anna Mae moves to Saint Louis to join her mother and older sister, leaving her grandmother behind. In real life, her grandmother dies, forcing Anna Mae to move in with her mother. However, in the musical, Gran Georgeanna’s death is only implied, and Anna Mae’s move to Saint Louis is depicted as a move for the sake of her career, rather than a move of necessity.

This decision is dramatized in the song “Don’t Turn Around,” a lesser-known track from the B side of 1986’s Break Every Rule. Covers by bands like Ace of Base popularized the song, but the musical reclaims it and arranges it as a duet between Anna Mae and her grandmother. The song becomes an ode to home, whether a place or a person. Anna Mae says farewell not only to her grandmother, but to Nutbush too—and even herself. Once she meets Ike Turner in Saint Louis and gains success, she assumes the stage name Tina Turner. Though she doesn’t want to leave, she must to become Tina, the star her grandmother has always known her to be.

I’ve had my own share of farewells, as an immigrant and also someone with big dreams. I grew up in Atlanta but went to college in New York City, with a stint abroad in South Africa. I have family in my homeland of Kenya and the United States, but I don’t see them often. My maternal grandmother visited us in Atlanta from Kenya every few years on a visa. When she became a US resident, she spent most of 2019 with us. That October, she returned to Kenya for a visit. A few weeks later, in early November, my mother called me at school; I was in New York, in the middle of my senior year. My grandmother was in the hospital. This was not an unusual occurrence; as she grew older, my grandmother was often hospitalized, but she always bounced back.

This time was different. She had sepsis, which killed her in the span of one week.

Our last conversation was on the phone. Mercifully, our last words were I love you. Her trip to Kenya was meant to be temporary; she intended to return for my college graduation in May 2020, before Covid and her death warped that dream. This was my deepest pain, that I would have my grandmother at neither my lowest nor highest moment.

Over two days of prayer, song, and ceremony, we sent my grandmother to her spiritual home. At the church, we sang “It Is Well With My Soul.” It was hard to sing, as it was hard to breathe. I did not want to hear my voice say these words. I did not see the comfort in these hymns. After the service, we proceeded to her rural homestead in Homa Bay, Kenya, where hundreds of people gathered to honor my grandmother.

On the first night of a Kenyan funeral celebration, it is customary to stay awake all night, to keep vigil over the casket. My grandmother was stationed at the front porch. Friends and relatives were posted on the lawn, on the porch, and even in the house. I grew tired well before midnight and went to bed in the guest room. All night, the DJ, with a setup under a tent outside the house, played religious dancehall and soca music, loud enough that it could be heard for miles. It was concert volume; the bass was under my skin. Every time I drifted to sleep, I was jolted awake by the skengay beat.

Every time I drifted to sleep, I was jolted awake by the skengay beat.

In the morning, after a sleepless night, we held a funeral service and buried my grandmother in the backyard, beside my grandfather’s plot. This time, it was the music of mourning—our wails, our sobs—that tormented me.

The silence that followed her burial is one of the sweetest sounds I’ve ever known.

When I saw Tina: The Tina Turner Musical in February 2020, I had forgotten that music could be a salve. I’d spent the past months in the viselike grip of grief. I barely slept, busied myself with schoolwork, and cocooned myself in depression, refusing to face my loss.

But the musical wouldn’t let me bypass the pain. I was inspired by Tina Turner’s resolve. She rose to fame while suffering abuse from her husband, manager, and collaborator Ike, then dealt with the fallout of her career after separating from him. Among all this, she was a mother, and she made the decision, after a hiatus in her late thirties, to jump-start her career in the United Kingdom on her own.

She doubted this impulse, and herself. She was hesitant to record what would become her best-selling album Private Dancer, fearing that the pop- and rock-influenced style her label preferred was too far from her own sound. She feared getting roped back into a career in which men controlled her every move. She feared, too, the new spark between her and her now-husband Erwin Bach.

In this moment of doubt, the musical shows Tina breaking down in her dressing room. She is visited by the spirits of her inner child and grandmother in the song “Tonight.” It was originally recorded by Turner and David Bowie for his 1984 studio album of the same name. But for Tina, the song is pared down and even more sentimental, as her younger self and grandmother soothe her with the lyrics: “I will love you till I die / I will see you in the sky tonight.”

At that moment, I was forced to confront the apotheosis of my grief. I wept—I wept as I sat in the audience. I had lost not only my grandmother, but my childhood. I couldn’t get either of them back—little Charlene, or my grandmother—but also I had them with me in a new way. As I grieved their physical loss, I needed to remember that I had them with me spiritually. Tina Turner’s Buddhist faith saved her life, she said, and she frequently recites “Nam myoho renge kyo,” a Nichiren Buddhist mantra that empowers practitioners “to bring forth their inherent wisdom, compassion, courage and creative energy” in times of strife. This principle resonates deeply with me.

Grief requires faith, trust in the unseen, devotion to the mystic. One side effect of my grief was that I became more prayerful, reconnecting with the Christian faith of my upbringing and also deepening my understanding of Buddhism and meditation. In both of these faiths and many, because we cannot see our God, we listen. Sound is how I express my faith and how I make it palpable, whether it is through the chants of Buddhism, the harmonies of gospel music, or the rapture of Broadway musicals. In a theater, I am freed by the voices that shake the rafters, the dancing, the lights, and the colors. Musicals are my form of catharsis.

Until Tina, I didn’t know I could create this liberatory experience by myself. I bought a cheap guitar online in July 2020 and started practicing. This was not my first instrument, granted; I played viola through middle and high school. However, I still needed to adjust to the guitar’s six strings as opposed to the viola’s four. I had to get my right hand used to strumming, rather than bowing. The calluses on my fingers and soreness of my wrist were reminders of the dedication necessary to learn and study an instrument, the way the process humbles you.

Once I memorized popular chords, I began practicing with my favorite songs. Once I had covers down, I wanted to start writing my own music. Since many songs are just loops of chords, I figured I could write my own. I have several songs in progress. The first one I have finished is about my grandmother.

It’s titled “Up There.” The chorus goes: “Drowning in fears, need you near / Speaking through tears, can you hear? / Know you’re up there, want you down here.” Singing the song helps me address the times my grief feels unbearable when my grandmother’s spirit is not enough to comfort me. It’s an inverse of Tina’s “Tonight,” which describes a state that I find harder to access: gratitude.

“Drowning in fears, need you near / Speaking through tears, can you hear? / Know you’re up there, want you down here.”

I’m grateful that I’ve found a way to honor my grandmother through music. Learning guitar and singing has been a battle with self-doubt. I fear rewriting the script I fashioned for myself, as I tell myself that I’m a writer, not a musician. Music making is an intensely vulnerable thing to explore and learn; it’s something relatively new to me, something that I have not taken seriously before. Deciding to take vocal lessons was a process that I only had the courage to begin this past February, even though I knew they would be helpful when I started guitar.

I feel guided to music. It’s a deeply personal practice, one that pleases that little girl in me that sang incessantly around the house before she grew too self-conscious to speak, let alone sing. It also reminds me of the musicality of my grandmother, which I never fully appreciated when she was alive.

When she wasn’t telling stories or jokes, she was humming to herself. She would even create a song for each person in my family when we arrived home from school and work. I didn’t see her love of music as something that we shared until she died. I can’t even imagine how beautiful it would be to sing to and with her as Tina does in the musical.

The musical ends with a nod to Tina Turner’s legendary performance in Rio de Janeiro on her Break Every Rule World Tour. It is a triumphant closing, depicting Tina as the larger-than-life legend we know her as today. But I left the theater with the intimate and comforting recognition of Tina as a fellow granddaughter, whose story helped me not only express my grief, but use it to find my voice.

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