“I’ve never been one to be real feminine, like the girl singers that I love so much,” she told the host. Rather than naming the soul sisters Aretha Franklin and Etta James, she cited Ray Charles and Sam Cooke as big influences on her vocal style. On The Dick Cavett Show, Cavett asked her to list her musical inspirations. Soon they were guests on numerous television shows, some of which were not prepared for a woman like Turner. The media descended on the duo after “Proud Mary” blew up. Read: How Nina Simone and James Brown mourned MLK Jr. But in the end, it’s Turner’s soulful ecstasy that sells it. It has all the fury of James Brown, all the grit of Janis Joplin, all the swagger of the Rolling Stones. It’s no wonder the song stormed the airwaves in the early ’70s. “Rolling! Rolling! Rolling on the river!” she sings at the top of her formidable lungs, just as much a force of nature as the Mighty Mississippi in the lyrics. In a detonation of blindingly fast funk, the band throws riffs, beats, and blasts of horn into the sky as Turner’s rasp goes supernova. After a couple of hypnotic minutes, the music trails away. Turner says a few words by way of introduction, but the softness in her voice isn’t a sedative-it’s the hiss of a fuse being lit. The song begins slowly and sparsely, with a hushed arrangement of guitar, bass, and drums. But Turner upped the intensity of Fogerty’s country-rock anthem by a factor of 10. Written by the band’s leader, John Fogerty, it remains as famous and revered as Turner’s version, and rightly so. As she says in her 2020 book That’s My Life, “Whatever happens to me, when it’s time to get something done, I do it.” The result was the career breakthrough she and Ike had long been fighting for.ĬCR’s rootsy, laid-back “Proud Mary” is no slouch. “My whole thing is the fact that I am to Ike-I’m going to use the term ‘doll’-that you sort of mold.” Their 1962 marriage didn’t make things any better, but when Turner heard CCR’s “Proud Mary” on the radio in early 1969, she knew she had to record it. “I have to do what Ike says,” she told Rolling Stone in 1971. He also beat and belittled her, as she’s opened up about publicly many times throughout her life. As the founder and songwriter of the group, Ike brooked few creative suggestions from Turner. She was 18 when she joined Ike’s Kings of Rhythm in 1957. Turner had to face her fears just to get “Proud Mary” made.
I’d never in my life seen a woman so powerful, so fearless, so fabulous.” Onstage, Beyoncé said to her hero, who was sitting in a balcony next to the first lady, Laura Bush, “I’ll never forget the first time I saw you perform. In recent years, performances of Turner’s version have appeared on The Voice and The Masked Singer, and in 2005 Beyoncé sang it in Washington, D.C., when Turner was recognized at the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors. “Proud Mary,” which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release this month, remains a staple of popular culture. But the song’s success didn’t just help bring her back to life after her suicide attempt it also planted the seeds of her liberation as both an artist and a woman. 4 on Billboard’s pop chart, sold more than 1 million copies, and earned Turner the first of her 12 Grammy Awards. After the single’s release in January 1971, it rose to No. (Ike later said that the allegations of abuse were exaggerated, though he admitted multiple times to hitting Turner.) The couple had yet to make a big impression on America at large-until “Proud Mary” busted down that door.
Before that, Turner and her infamously abusive husband were an established act in the world of R&B. The song that helped revive Turner was “Proud Mary.” A cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit from 1969, Turner’s sizzling version was released when she was half of the married duo Ike and Tina Turner-and it was “the single that brought this dynamic group to national attention,” Cash Box magazine subsequently said. But it was not in my nature to stay down for long.” I thought death was my only chance at escape. “At first I was disappointed when I woke up and realized I was still alive. “People backstage noticed something was very wrong with me and rushed me to the hospital, which saved my life,” she writes in her book Happiness Becomes You, published in the fall. Before a concert one night in 1968, shortly prior to recording the song that would launch her into superstardom, Tina Turner swallowed sleeping pills and lay down to die.
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