Tina Turner‘s ex-husband, Ike Turner, can take some credit for introducing the icon to the world of music, but when it comes to their marriage, the ex-couple’s relationship was anything but glitz and glamour. The “What’s Love Got to Do With It” artist and the late musician shared an extremely tumultuous romance over the course of nearly two decades.
Tina and Ike’s relationship history dates back to the 1950s. The performing pair met in 1956 at Club Manhattan in Tennessee. According to Biography.com, their bond was formed when the songstress performed B.B. King’s “You Know I Love You.” Ike, who was a member of the Kings of Rhythm, embraced the beauty’s powerful voice and, eventually, they formed Ike and Tina Turner Revue in 1957.
Despite their budding bond, in 1958, Tina welcomed her first child alongside Kings of Rhythm saxophonist Raymond Hill. The duo, however, called it quits shortly after, and by 1960, she became romantically involved with Ike. That same year, Tina expanded her family when she gave birth to her and Ike’s first and only son together, Ronnie.
Two years later, the Grammy winner and Ike married in Tijuana, Mexico. Not long after, she adopted the “River Deep Mountain High” crooner’s older children, Ike Turner Jr. and Michael Turner, whom he welcomed during his previous relationship with Lorraine Taylor.
Things started going downhill from there, though. Throughout their marriage, Tina said Ike physically and sexually abused her. In her 2018 memoir My Love Story, Tina recounted the years of emotional abuse and specifically pointed out the time Ike told her to change her birth name from Anna Mae Bullock to Tina Turner.
“I said I didn’t want to change my name,” she wrote in the book, according to W Magazine. “First, he was verbally abusive. Then, he picked up a wooden shoe stretcher. Ike knew what he was doing. If you play guitar, you never use your fists in a fight. He used the shoe stretcher to strike me in the head — always the head.”
Tina said the abuse was so traumatic, she even tried to take her own life in 1968. As she penned in her memoir, the “We Don’t Need Another Hero” musician took an entire bottle of sleeping pills in an attempt to commit suicide. “I was unhappy when I woke up,” Tina candidly wrote. “But I came out of the darkness believing I was meant to survive.”
Tina eventually filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences as the reason, in July 1976. The exes’ divorce was finalized two years later in 1978. Fortunately, she found love with Erwin Bach in the 1990s, and the couple — who married in 2013 — has been living a life of wedded bliss ever since. “After all the chaos, she’s made the life she’s always dreamed of,” a friend of Tina’s told Closer Weekly in 2017.
Keep scrolling to learn more about Tina’s late ex-husband.
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