📍Nutbush, Tennessee, USA
1939 – 1955“I was Anna Mae Bullock, and I grew up in Nutbush, a farming community in West Tennessee so small it was little more than a few buildings strung along the highway, among cotton fields stretching out flat under the sky. My father, Floyd Richard Bullock, oversaw the sharecroppers on the Poindexter farm, and we children picked cotton alongside everyone else. On Sundays I sang in the church choir, and I went to the little one-room Flagg Grove School, built on land given by a local Black farmer for Black children, through the eighth grade. When I was about ten my mother left, and later my father moved north too, so my sister Alline and I were passed between relatives until I settled with my grandmother Georgeanna in nearby Brownsville. I was a tomboy: cheerleading, basketball, out every chance I got, and always singing, at church, at school, at picnics and on the porch. Nutbush taught me to work hard and to keep going when the people you love let you down. Those lessons got me through everything that came after. At sixteen, after my grandmother died, I moved to St Louis to join my mother, and there, in the clubs, I met Ike Turner and began the career that took me around the world. When I wrote Nutbush City Limits in 1973, I was teasing about how tiny the place was, but I was proud of it too. My old schoolhouse was moved to Brownsville and made into the Tina Turner Museum, and in 2025 a statue of me was unveiled in the town, steps from my old high school.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google