Tina Turner - Early Life

Early Life

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, an unincorporated area in Haywood County, Tennessee, on November 26, 1939 at Haywood Memorial Hospital, to Zelma Priscilla (née Currie) and Floyd Richard Bullock. Both Zelma and Floyd were factory workers while Floyd worked as a Baptist deacon and overseer of the sharecropping farm, Pointdexter Farm. Turner is of African American and European descent. Turner had assumed in interviews that her mother had possible Navajo and Cherokee descent due to her "reddish features", though Turner was only shown to have only 1% Native American blood. She attended the local Flag Grove School, the land for which had been sold below market value to the school trustees by her great-great-uncle in 1889. Ann had an older sister, Ruby Aillene. For a time during World War II, their parents relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee to do work at a wartime defense facility.

During this period, Ann and Aillene were split up and lived in different homes, with Ann settling at her strict and religious paternal grandparents. Eventually the sisters reunited with their parents after moving with them to Knoxville. During their time in Knoxville, they worked out at the farm picking cotton and strawberries. Turner also had her first singing experiences at Knoxville's Spring Hill Baptist Church. By the time Ann was eleven, her mother had left her father for good, later divorcing, following a marriage that had been abusive, disappearing without telling her kids. Zelma relocated to St. Louis to live with Turner's aunt. After marrying another woman, Floyd Bullock also left the family for Detroit, when Turner was 13. The sisters then were sent to live with their aunt Georgie in Brownsville. Turner would later write in her memoirs that she felt she had been unwanted due to her parents' strained marriage. Before her teens, Turner became a domestic worker for a family named The Hendersons in Ripley.

Growing up a tomboy, Turner joined both the cheerleading squad and the female's basketball team in her local high school and "socialized every chance she got". At sixteen, her aunt died suddenly. Following her aunt's funeral, Turner's mother brought her to St. Louis, where her sister had already relocated to. In St. Louis, she attended Sumner High School. Ann eventually graduated from the school in 1958 and subsequently found work as a nurse's aide at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, hoping to be a nurse.