'I WAS A HOMETOWN GIRL'

GROWING UP WAS TOUGH AS ANNA MAE FACED ADVERSITY WITH HARD WORK AND HOPE

- SUE LEE

It was a simple statement, coming from Tina herself in an interview to promote a new museum opening in her honour at her old schoolhouse. “I hope as people walk through the school they see I set an example as a hometown girl who grew up in hard times that made a good life.”

Yet the quote masks a childhood beset by privation, abandonment and tragedy.

It also speaks of her indomitable spirit to keep on fighting and, from the most unlikely of beginnings, become a worldwide superstar and global icon.

Tina was born Anna Mae Bullock on 26 November 1939 in Brownsville, Tennessee, and raised in nearby Nutbush. It was, as the lyrics of Nutbush City Limits note, “a one-horse town” where ‘‘you go to store on Fridays, you go to church on Sundays”.

The daughter of a factory worker mother, Zelma and Floyd Richard Bullock, a farm overseer and Baptist deacon, it was a tough upbringing both materially and emotionally.

In an interview in 1986 she admitted her mother hadn’t loved her.

“And I knew the difference because I used to watch her with my sister Alline,” she told Rolling Stone magazine.

“How she was with her and how she was with me. She loved Alline.”