free read (✔️pdf❤️) Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner Library of Religious

Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner Library of Religious Biography LRB))

Description : What People Are Saying Excerpt from the Introduction of Dancing in My Dreams My own journey to writing a religious biography of Tina Turner began in a sense in my childhood. What s Love Got to Do with It? was among the VHS tapes that we had at home. My cousins Kristen Porché and I would perform the film s musical numbers for

our older cousin Charles. Despite this I did not connect the character in the movie to any actual living person. I considered Angela Bassett as Tina Turner to be simply another character on par with Bassett s portrayal of Katherine Jackson in The Jacksons: An American Dream.

However I made the connection between the life portrayed in What s Love Got to Do with It? and Tina Turner as an actual historical living person in December I sat with my brother Cornelius as he flipped through television channels. On CBS we saw a commercial advertising a concert special: Tina Turner One Last Time Live. This was an advertisement for a concert recorded on the Tina Turner Twenty Four Seven World Tour I begged my brother to let me watch it and together we watched the entire concert special. Work like you don t need the money ” James Earl Jones recited quoting Rumi to introduce Turner. He continued: Love like you ve never been hurt.

Dance like nobody s watching. Ladies and gentlemen: Tina Turner ” With that the curtain opened and I was reintroduced to the legend that is Tina Turner. By the time the special ended with Turner on a platform extended over the audience singing Nutbush City Limits ” I was determined to learn more about her. From that time I avidly collected her albums memorabilia and autobiographies. Eventually I saw Turner live on the Fiftieth Anniversary Concert Tour – As Oprah Winfrey said about her own experience seeing Turner perform I caught the spirit (see chap. below) At the same time I began studying Buddhism. Even as I came to understand that Turner herself is a Buddhist it became increasingly clear to me that other religious traditions also played prominent roles in Turner s life. I was curious about the development of Turner s religious beliefs and the role they played in her career. As I started to research Turner s religiosity from an academic perspective I realized that the accounts of Turner s life I read neither sufficiently emphasized religion (since those accounts were often concerned with promoting Turner s career religion served as one discussion item among many in her promotional agenda) nor distinguished the intertwined threads of her religious life. Those accounts also failed to notice that throughout her career Turner had taken every available opportunity to discuss her religious beliefs explain her practices and name her aspiration to become a religious teacher. This latter aspiration was itself a part of the larger wildest dreams message at the center of Turner s iconic brand. Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner corrects these oversights. Tina Turner s remarkable life begins as the story of a young Black woman who rose from the cotton fields of Nutbush Tennessee. Her early life as the daughter of

sharecroppers with her horizons proscribed by Jim Crow racism was a story common to many young southern Black children in the s.

Born Anna Mae Bullock in Turner moved constantly in those early years after being abandoned by her parents. Like many young Black southern women growing up in church she had a talent for singing that she honed by singing at picnics in a church choir and along to the radio. Radio programs and films revealed to her the possibility of a world outside of West Tennessee and she began to harbor dreams of seeing that world herself. Turner reunited with her mother in in St. Louis and there she met early rock pioneer Ike Turner. She began singing with Ike Turner and by she had formed half of the Ike &Tina Turner Revue. Over their sixteen year partnership Ike and Tina Turner released a string of memorable songs including A Fool in Love ” River Deep Mountain High ” Proud Mary ” and Nutbush City Limits.” Their marriage would become one of the most infamous in music history when Turner revealed in a interview that the reason they divorced in was that Ike Turner had physically and mentally abused her for most of their time together. After working for eight years to establish herself as a solo artist Turner reemerged with s Private Dancer album and staged one of the most well known comebacks in popular music history. Turner retired from live performances in having established herself as a commercially successful recording and performing artist. Author Bio Ralph H. Craig III is a scholar of religion holding a PhD in religious studies from Stanford University. He received his BA in theological studies from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles CA. He specializes in Buddhism with a focus on South Asian Buddhism and American Buddhism. His research interests include comparative religion religion and popular culture literature and African American studies.