“They found that there was still segregation, there was still racism, there were still very harsh limits on African Americans. “‘Up South’ was a term that those Black migrants from the South used to describe what they found in those northern Midwestern and western cities,” Mahon said.

In some ways, what the 16-year-old girl found in her new home wasn’t so different from her experience of Jim Crow segregation as a child. Louis before Bullock, who was raised by grandparents and other relatives in Tennessee, eventually rejoined her mother and sister in St. Provided by the author Tina Turner is among the musical titans who get their due in Maureen Mahon’s 2020 book “Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll.”īullock’s mother had already relocated to St. Bullock’s own arrival in the Gateway City was a part of that. Louis was a hub during the Great Migration, as many African Americans left the South between the 1920s and 1950s. Louis, Illinois, across the Mississippi River.” “Between the truck and the Rolls, Tina and Ike met and forged their professional and personal partnership in the Up South metropolis of St. “It is an image of the kind of arrival that African American migrants leaving the South might have dreamed of achieving, heading out west to Los Angeles where the Turners put down roots in the early 1960s,” Mahon writes in the Oxford American feature.

The back features the singer with an automobile again - but this time it’s a Rolls-Royce, and Turner sports heels and a fur coat. The album cover depicts Tina Turner in a country setting, propping her bare foot on the grill of a 1950s-style Chevy truck. The story takes the two sides of cover art for the duo’s 1973 album “Nutbush City Limits” as a jumping-off point. Louis: Ike & Tina Turner and the scene that formed their art.” Mahon, who is an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Music, explores that history in a recently published Oxford American deep dive, titled “ Manhattan in East St. “It was a really vibrant scene in the 1940s and 1950s.” “So many African American artists were a part of ,” Mahon explained Thursday on St. Flickr Tina Turner dances to “Proud Mary” during an ABC-TV program in August 1971.

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