The Rolling Stone Interview: Tina Turner

You've come a long way in life, Tina. You must feel very satisfied in how you've pulled yourself together in the last ten years since leaving Ike.
I don't have one debt at the moment. I have a home now. I always wanted a home, but I didn't have one because my parents broke up. I was determined to have that foundation. So I bought my mother a house, and now we all go there — my sons, my sister, her daughter. I'm reliving something I wanted when I was a child. The principal's daughters had homes, and now I have a home. I've made that dream a reality.

I'm self-made. I always wanted to make myself a better person, because I was not educated. But that was my dream — to have class. Now it's too late for that. You can't read a book like my autobiography and say, ''She's classy.'' You can say, ''She's a respectable woman,'' but you can't say ''classy.'' My role model was always Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Now, you're talking about high stuff, right? [Laughs.] My taste was high. So when it came to role models, I looked at presidents' wives. Of course, you're talking about a farm girl who stood in the fields, dreaming, years ago, wishing she was that kind of person. But if I had been that kind of person, do you think I could sing with the emotions I do? You sing with those emotions because you've had pain in your heart. The bloodline of my family didn't come from that kind of royalty. Why I relate to it, I don't know. That's the class I wanted to be. But I wasn't, so I dealt with the class I was in. I have never disrespected myself, and I'm still very proud of myself. But society doesn't look at that as class, that type of woman. Society respects me, I think, because I'm self-made and I climbed to the top. But it was the high-class black people I wanted respect from. So I never let go of that dream.

Basically, your family were sharecroppers. Do you feel you were middle-class?
We were well-to-do farmers — that's as close as I can get to explaining it. To me, it seemed as if we lived well. My sister and I had our own room. Each season we'd get new clothes, and I was always fresh and neat, especially compared to a lot of other people around me. We were never hungry. Of course, we knew the difference between our family and, say, the daughters of schoolteachers — those people were educated. My parents weren't, per se, but they had a lot of common sense and spoke well. We weren't low-class people. In fact, my parents were church people; my father was a deacon in the church.

Both of your parents deserted you at different points in your childhood. Didn't they have a tumultuous marriage?
My mother and father didn't love each other, so they were always fighting.

Your mother left when you were ten. Did you have any idea that she was going to leave?
No, but when she was gone, I knew she was gone. She'd left before, but then she'd always taken us with her, because she would go to her mother's. Daddy would come and talk her into coming back home. But this time he knew she was really gone. He knew it was the end. I thought she was going to send for me, but she never did. She didn't have the money to take my sister and me with her, because she was going to St. Louis, where she'd have to live with people herself.