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The other day I read aloud a chapter from the novel I’m writing. I run an arts organization and I’m also the lead artist and I regularly share new writing. Afterward, someone said, “That was beautiful, but so sad.”

I’m always stopped by that sort of thing—I want to parse through the mention of the word sad, the implied negativity, which means the person felt bad. I wanted to point out the person’s limited ability to live with complex emotional realities. To say, sadness is a part of life, why do you fear it?

Thankfully someone else stepped in and said, “Yes, but aren’t your favorite books sad? Isn’t that what makes us love them?”

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The term, playing blue, or going blue, means to perform material that is sexual in nature. Often this is outright profanity but it also can be material that is laced with innuendo. 

I have a weekly radio show and I curate a playlist every week. For Women’s History Month I played music by women for the entire month. Singers, songwriters, composers, instrumentalists. 

The other night I played an Alberta Hunter track on the show called My Handyman Ain’t Handy No More. It’s a brilliant example of blue material that never crosses over into vulgarity. Hunter’s joy in delivering the double entendres is clear in this live performance from 1981, when she was 86 years old. The song was written by Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf and originally recorded in 1930 by Edith Wilson, an early star of African-American musical theater.

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A babysitter took my brothers and me to see Tommy when it came out. One of the selling points--although I can’t imagine I had any say in the matter—was knowing that Tina Turner was in it. The year was 1976, I was twelve and the movie mystified, terrified and seduced me—especially the performances of Ann-Margret, as Tommy’s mother, and Tina Turner, as The Acid Queen.

Watching the clip of The Acid Queen now, I’m shocked that I was allowed to see this when I was twelve. I’m not complaining. We didn’t have content warnings back then. Would I have been able to turn away, even if we did? I doubt it. All we had was the MPA rating system and Tommy was rated PG so with our adult babysitter, we walked right in. Check out the clip here—for Tina’s magnetic performance and Roger Daltrey’s near nudity.

I had forgotten that the problematic word gypsy was such a prominent part of the lyric. And at the beginning of the clip—the number takes place in a strip joint, where the Acid Queen seems to live? Or work? Maybe she owns the place?—you’ll notice a sign that reads EXOTIC, over Oliver Reed’s shoulder.

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Way back in the 90s, a friend made me a mixtape with some Esther Phillips tracks. Her voice dug into me—her cover of Bill Withers’ Use Me, is a good example of another artist nearly upstaging a song’s creator. 

Another track of hers on that mixtape was Black Eyed Blues. I assumed the song was about being beaten, abused by a lover or a husband, or a member of the police force. But the lyrics are complicated. Turns out it’s a Joe Cocker tune. Phillips’ version features an extended vocal improvisation toward the end where she states: “When I was a little girl, I was vaccinated by something I wasn’t supposed to have anyhow. Now, I don’t care what nobody thinks of me, because nobody that I know wants to get up early in the morning and look in the mirror and be ugly with a black eye.”

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In TINA, Turner describes her escape from Ike and his years of torture. They’ve just landed in Dallas and are in a car headed from the airport to their hotel when he hits her in the face. She fights back, which isn’t what usually happened. She had discovered Buddhism and her practice began to give her a newfound confidence, and led to her being able to finally leave him.

This moment is illustrated by a still photo of her with a fat lip and the traces of a black eye.

One of the most powerful aspects of TINA is how they show her attempts to change her story, to move away from her identity as an abused person, who went through years of horrible pain that she had no interest in reliving. Years after she left him and became a global sensation on her own, over and over again, journalists and talk show hosts wanted to know about Ike, how she feels about Ike.

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An album I love is LaVern Sings Bessie Smith. Baker was from Chicago and started singing under the name Little Miss Sharecropper (!).  At the time this album was made—1957—she was well known as a pop singer with hits including Jim Dandy and Tweedle Dee. 

It’s always interesting when one great artist pays homage to another, especially one who was a defining influence. This album is a great example. Another is Shelby Lynne covering Dusty Springfield. And, of course, Ella Fitzgerald’s Great American Songbook, the brilliant series produced by Verve Records. Miss Fitzgerald covered Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Rogers and Hart, the Gershwins and more. For a great take on that career defining series go here.

Speaking of blue, this is LaVern Baker’s great cover of Bessie Smith’s Empty Bed Blues. I had been listening to the LaVern Baker album since the 1990s, so I was familiar with her cover of Back Water Blues. But when Hurricane Katrina came along, I would hear the lyrics with new ears. Another example of things changing but not.

Here’s the Bessie Smith version of Back Water Blues from 1927.  

Baker was the second woman, behind Aretha Franklin, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

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I was looking forward to the point in the doc when Tina records River Deep Mountain High, a majestic performance. The vision for the record was Phil Spector’s but the star is Tina’s vocal. Not unlike how the band was ruled by Ike, though increasingly the draw was Tina. Spector, of course, was another abuser who was later convicted of murder for the killing of Lana Jane Clarkson.

It’s frustrating to watch videos for River Deep Mountain High because, though Ike had nothing to do with it—Spector even paid him to stay away during the recordings—he is featured prominently and it can come to seem that she was singing about her devotion to him. I like to imagine she’s singing to herself.

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It’s no stretch to say that all of this music is descended from what we call Negro Spirituals.. And that these women are descended from the people who sang those spirituals.

The context of that music was brutality. Scots Irish having been beaten and abused by the British, were often the best slave drivers/overseers. In an interesting irony, the term blue for profane material, is traced to the Scottish. While The Blues refers most likely to blue devils, old time slang for depression, or struggles or bad times.

Spirituals were an appeal to a higher authority than that of the overseer or the plantation owner; no matter the subject, they are songs of celebration, proclaiming that being beaten or defeated has nothing to do with the one being beaten. In those songs we hear the repeated refrain: I may be wrecked but I’m not ruined.

The singing itself was evidence of one’s endurance.

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In 1985, I was lucky enough to see Tina in concert at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, as part of the Private Dancer tour. She was electrifying and the clearest memory I have of that night is feeling as if she knew I was out there.

Years later I would return to the Wiltern to see Nina Simone perform. After being introduced by her daughter, she entered wearing a green satin dress and carrying a fan-like sceptre. She stopped at center stage, faced the audience and began to twirl the sceptre slowly then faster and the audience began to scream and stomp, louder and louder the faster her sceptre went. Once we’d all arrived at a heightened state, Nina Simone sat at her piano and began to play.

Check out this brilliant live performance of Nina Simone performing I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free at the 1975 Montreux Jazz Festival.

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There’s a point in TINA, where she says the only joy or freedom she felt during those years with Ike, was during her rehearsals with the Ikettes. 

Watching those early performances, which feel more like ecstatic rites, it seems the explosive energy she exuded onstage was related to that truth: this moment, right here on this stage, is freedom, it’s an altar, this is my place of power.

Watch this clip of Tina and the Ikettes performing Wanna Take You Higher from 1973. (Wait for the backbend...)

At the very end of the movie, Angela Bassett says, “Tina is love.” And it’s true, after all is said and done, what is left is the feeling of exuberant joy and a lust for living. Even as Tina herself says, “Mine has been a life of abuse,” and proclaims her acceptance of that, her spirit shines.

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Tina Turner is a nominee for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. In 1991, she was inducted as part of Ike and Tina Turner. This time it would be Tina as a solo artist. The woman who taught Mick Jagger how to dance. The Queen of Rock and Roll. On her own. Triumphant.