Think of it as rock ‘n’ roll’s original spoiler alert.
Sermonizing in her low, throaty croon as her husband Ike Turner strums an electric guitar, Tina Turner famously introduces the couple’s indelible 1971 recording of “Proud Mary” by informing the listener, “Every now and then, I think you might like to hear something from us, nice and easy. There’s just one thing,” she adds. “You see, we never, ever” — in her telling, the words are more like “nevah, evah” — “do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough.” Pause for effect. “But we’re gonna take the beginning of this song and do it easy.” Another beat.
“But then we’re gonna do the finish … rough.”
Did this little spiel, a version of which Turner would go on to deliver for decades every time she did “Proud Mary” in concert, ever prevent anyone from being bowled over when she got to the rough part? Unlikely. That’s how volcanic Turner’s performance of “Proud Mary” was, particularly onstage, where she’d turn the Credence Clearwater Revival tune into a shaking, shimmying soul-rock rave-up that made you half-expect the fringe to come flying off her sparkly mini-dress.
Watch any of the dozens of live “Proud Mary’s” on YouTube, and what you’ll be struck by — beyond her mastery of tone and timing — is how gloriously sweaty the singer is by the end, as though the effort she’d put into the song had come as a surprise even to her (or at least to her body). Yet there she’d be the next time she sang it, trying to warn everybody about what was coming before flipping wigs all over again.
Turner, who died Wednesday at age 83, lived a life that defied expectation. She made it through a hardscrabble childhood in rural Tennessee to become a dynamo of ’60s R&B in a duo with Ike, whose horrific abuse she survived to reinvent herself as one of the biggest solo acts of the ’80s; she toured the world until she was almost 70, then retired in 2009 without going back on it like virtually every other pop star in history.