As the Tina Turner (originally Anna Mae Bullock) life story goes forward, after she graduates from high school, her mother comes back for the funeral of a family member, and she invites both her daughters, Alline and Anna Mae, to come to St. Louis and live with her.
"And so I decided to go," Tina writes.
The book's background narrator continues:
[excerpt from I, Tina] ---------------- St. Louis in the mid-fifties was a fairly sedate place - especially in comparison to East St. Louis, its sister city across the Mississippi River. East St. Louis had action, and it never seemed to stop.
There were cathouses and gambling dens and an infinity of clubs that ranged from lavish nightclubs to nondescript roadhouses at the end of anonymous dirt roads.
The whole area was awhirl with night life, from places like the Blue Note and the Bird Cage, the Sportsman and the Lakeside, and all kinds of jazz clubs to Perry's Lounge in Eagle Park, Kingsbury's and Garrett's Lounge in Madison - the list seemed endless.
"Some of those places didn't even have keys to the front door," says Gene Washington, a local drummer at the time. "They just stayed open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year."
Adds Clayton Love, the Clarksdale singer who got his first sight of the St. Louis area around this same time: "It was better than Vegas. There was every kind of entertainment you could want. And on the East Side, it was just ridiculously happy."
Anna Mae Bullock, sixteen years old and fresh from the backwoods of Tennessee, knew nothing of such high life upon arriving in St. Louis to live with her mother. She would soon learn, however - entree was provided by her sister Alline, already employed as a barmaid at a local club.
Like an extraordinarily large number of other local young women, Alline would rave about what she considered the hottest band in town: the Kings of Rhythm, led by a wiry little guitarist named Ike Turner.
the Macarthur Bridge over the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to East St. Louis
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