Tina Turner's religion and early life: Singer's journey from Baptist church upbringing to Buddhism conversion
Tina Turner is one of the living examples of how Buddhism can change people's life. The Black American singer has opened up about her troubled past and living with post-traumatic stress disorder in a new film titled 'TINA', a documentary the soul and rock star says is the final act of the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll's public life before bowing out.
The upcoming two-part documentary on Turner's life is her farewell to fans, according to her partner, Erwin Bach, reported the BBC. It charts her rise to fame, as well as her abusive marriage to musician Ike Turner and her resurrection as a rock icon in the 1980s. Turner was not just a powerhouse on stage. She is a longtime Buddhist, who began her practice in the 1970s while struggling to end an abusive relationship with her ex-husband.
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A Baptist beginning
Turner wasn't always a Buddhist. She was born Anna Mae Bullock into a Baptist family in Tennessee and often calls herself a "Buddhist-Baptist". She said, in a 2016 Lion's Roar interview, that she went to church every Sunday. "The preachers were speaking the words of God, but I didn’t really hear what the preacher said," said Turner.
It was, instead, the environment that had an effect on her. "It was the people’s 'amen' in agreeing with the preacher," she said. Turner added that they had a young Baptist reunion to learn about the Bible, which put her in touch with knowledge "about God and Jesus and being nice to people".
She 'wasn't wanted'
Turner had a lonely and difficult childhood, with her parents constantly fighting each other. She was the youngest of three sisters and was separated from them when their parents relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, to work at a defense facility during World War II. Turner was sent to stay with her strict, religious paternal grandparents who were deacon and deaconess at the Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church.
When she was 11, her mother Zelma ran off without warning, seeking freedom from her abusive relationship with Turner's father Floyd by relocating to St Louis in 1950.
Two years later, Floyd, an overseer of the sharecroppers at Poindexter Farm on Highway 180, left them for Detroit to marry another woman. In her autobiography 'I, Tina', Turner said she felt her mother had not loved her, that she "wasn't wanted", and that her mother had decided to leave her father when she was pregnant with her. "She was a very young woman who didn't want another kid," Turner wrote.
Meeting Ike
When Bullock was 16, her grandmother died, so she went to live with her mother in St Louis, where she and her sister began to frequent nightclubs. It was there at the Manhattan Club where she first saw Ike Turner perform with his band the Kings of Rhythm.
Turner was impressed by his talent, recalling that she "almost went into a trance" watching him play. She asked him to let her sing in his band despite the fact that few women ever had the opportunity. But Ike never called her back. She even bore a child named Raymond with Raymond Hill, the saxophone player of the band, who left her.
So she paved her own way. One night in 1957, she got hold of the microphone from the band's drummer Eugene Washington, who her sister Allie was dating, during an intermission and sang the B.B. King's 'You Know I Love You'.
Her singing caught Ike's attention and she quickly became a featured singer with the artist, during which time Ike trained her in the finer points of vocal control and performance. Then on, Ike and Tina's shows were attended by a variety of celebrities including David Bowie, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin, Cher, James Brown, Ray Charles, Elton John and Elvis Presley. And Turner began to rack up on Grammy nominations and wins.
It was their relationship that made her most unhappy
Ike Turner changed her name to Tina, inspired by Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Nyoka the Jungle Girl to create her stage persona. The R&B singer added his last name and trademarked the name as a form of protection so that if Tina left him, as his previous singers had, he could replace her with another "Tina Turner".
By the mid-1970s, Ike was heavily addicted to cocaine, which hindered his relationship with Tina. In July 1976, Ike and Tina flew from Los Angeles to Dallas, where they had a gig at the Statler Hilton. They got into a physical altercation en route to the hotel, and shortly before arriving. Tina fled from Ike, with only 36 cents and a Mobil credit card in her pocket, and later hid at a friend's house. She filed for divorce on July 27 and it was finalized on March 29 two years later.
Tina revealed, in her autobiography, that Ike was abusive and promiscuous throughout their marriage, which led to her suicide attempt in 1968 by overdosing on Valium pills. "It was my relationship with Ike that made me most unhappy. At first, I had really been in love with him. Look what he'd done for me. But he was totally unpredictable," she said.
Ike, on multiple occasions, had even stated that he was never officially married to Tina, which is not true since they had a common-law marriage under California law. In his autobiography 'Takin' Back My Name', he stated: "Sure, I've slapped Tina. We had fights and there have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her."
The Lotus Sutra
"My mother taught me that saying the Lord’s Prayer would help me, so I kept saying it straight through life until I was introduced to Buddhism," Turner said in the interview with Lion's Roar.
In 1974, she met a woman named Valerie Bishop, a new secretary of the Turner Revue, who was a Buddhist and began to counsel her spiritually. Turner said to the World Tribune that it was in part through her spiritual practice of Buddhism that she felt she found her direct connection to God, to the Universe.
The 12-time Grammy Award-winning singer began, in 1973 Los Angeles, her practice of Nichiren Buddhism, an eponymous Mahayana school named after a 13th-century medieval Japanese priest who stressed the Lotus Sutra. Unlike his peers, the priest Nichiren believed that the Japanese title of the sutra, "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo", contains all of the dharma and that it is possible for a person to attain Buddhahood by chanting the scripture’s name.
'The highest place'
"Nam Myoho Renge Kyo is like a song. In the Soka Gakkai tradition, we are taught how to sing it. It is a sound and a rhythm and it touches a place inside you. That place we try to reach is the subconscious mind. I believe that is the highest place," she said. It didn’t matter, Turner said, that she changed from being a Baptist to being a Buddhist since she learned later that "they’re the same", and that "they just use different words".
"Maybe I stopped saying the Lord’s Prayer and went into Buddhism because I needed new words—I needed refreshment— to get to the next step," she said. Turner said she noticed that saying the Lord’s Prayer and chanting a mantra, both had a similar effect on her. But she found herself chanting a mantra for longer periods of time and more often than she "had ever said the Lord’s Prayer". "I didn’t have this system for the Lord’s Prayer and it’s a system that works for me," she said.
What's love got to do with it?
Turner says that some people are born into happy, enabling families where there is love and harmony in the house. "When you are born with that, you take it with you," she said in the interview. "But some people are born into situations where they’re exposed to everything but love." She goes on to say that the world is filled with such people who are traveling in the dark throughout their lives.
"No one has ever explained to them that they need to find love, and they have no education for love except for falling in love with another person, for sexual love. I believe that the problem with the world today is that we have too many people who are not in touch with true love," said the singer.
'The mantra takes care of you'
"When you don’t come from your mother with love, you might have the gift to be surrounded by other people or situations that are loving and you learn to love in that way," she said. In her autobiography, Turner said that after she learned the Buddhist chant, Ike, instead of reacting violently during recording sessions, would give her money to go shopping. She attributed his change in behavior to the benefit of her newfound spiritual practice. But how has the mantra helped Turner, who comes from such a troubled past, mentally?
"I have to say I don’t experience the feeling of guilt anymore," she said. "Practice clears the way." Chanting the mantra brings comfort because it removes uncomfortable mental attitudes. "It doesn’t just buy you a car or a house—it takes care of you," she said. Turner says that there are psychological benefits of having one's own quiet place or shrine in their house, as opposed to a not-so-private experience at church.
'Beyond'
Turner has collaborated with Tibetan Buddhists and met with the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso in Einsiedeln, Switzerland in 2005, citing this as an inspiration for a spiritual music project she later co-founded called 'Beyond'.
"Beyond is to remind people or to educate people that God is inside them. How you tap into God is your decision. Whether you meditate or whether you become a Christian, it’s up to you. Beyond is an invitation to open the heart for all religions and to become united," Turner said.
When asked about whether she is evolving spiritually, Turner responded by saying: "I think as long as you are on this planet as a human being, you never get to the top of spiritual evolution. I think that you evolve until you leave the planet and you don’t know how far you’ll get until you leave".
Watch 'What's Love Got to Do With It' here: