With a voice of astonishing power, Tina Turner evoked joy and pain

THERE ARE very few living American singers whose work springs from a distant, lost past. Dolly Parton, a titan of country music, was born in a one-room cabin by Little Pigeon River in Tennessee. Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock, grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, where her father oversaw sharecroppers; she had childhood memories of working in the cotton fields. Before she died on May 24th, she was a link to the forces that shaped the blues and country and rock’n’roll.

Like Ms Parton, she came to prominence in the early 1960s with the help of a man from whom she would later break—in Ms Parton’s case it was Porter Wagoner; in Ms Turner’s it was her first husband, Ike Turner, an R’n’B bandleader. Though their best-known songs (“River Deep - Mountain High”, “Nutbush City Limits”, their cover of John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary”) have never dropped out of circulation, the Turners’ reputation was forged in live performance. Ms Turner would sing, shimmy and shake alongside the backing vocalists, the Ikettes, while her husband led a tough-as-leather band.