I first encountered Tina Turner in a Whangārei nightclub in the early 1980s. At first I thought she was a man. And an angry one too. That’s because she was singing Nutbush City Limits in a voice of such paint-stripping quality it possibly explained the decor. The place was called Henry VIII. Its decor and sound system were from the late-Tudor period. Its playlist was pre- and mid-disco. Nutbush, the long five-minute version, was on high rotate.
From the song, I assumed those limits were to a big, bad, dangerous city, not the cotton-pickin’ tiny Tennessee town from which a young Annie Mae Bullock staged the first great escape of a life that ended last month at
