Released 41 years ago today, Private Dancer by Tina Turner pivoted Tina into the stratosphere of mega stardom and certified what fans already knew: Tina was a bona fide force of nature!
The album peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 chart for ten consecutive weeks and remained in the top ten for 39 weeks from August 1984 to May 1985.
7 singles were released from the album:
• “Let’s Stay Together”
November 1983 (U.K.)
• “Help!”
February 1984 (U.K.)
• “What’s Love Got to Do With It”
May 1984
• “Better Be Good to Me”
September 1984
• “Private Dancer”
November 1984
• “I Can’t Stand the Rain”
February 1985 (U.K.)
• “Show Some Respect”
April 1985 (U.S.)
Until the release of “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” Tina Turner had not had a U.S. top-ten single since the early 1970s [with “Proud Mary” when she was part of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue].
“What’s Love Got to Do With It” went to number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and remained there for three weeks, giving Tina her first and only solo number one hit in the U.S. Turner was 44 when the song hit number one, making her the oldest female solo artist to place a number one single on the U.S. Hot 100, at that time.
In the United States, Private Danceer was last certified 5× platinum on September 9, 1987, and to date it’s Tina’s best selling album. In Germany, the album went 5× gold, becoming one of the country’s best selling albums in history. It peaked at number two on the U.K. Albums Chart, where it was certified 3× platinum, remaining on the charts for 150 total weeks. It was certified 7× platinum for the shipment of over 700,000 copies in Canada by the Canadian Recording Industry Association.
At the 1985 Grammy Awards, Private Dancer won four of the six awards for which it was nominated:
• “Better Be Good to Me” Best Female Rock Vocal Performance
• “What’s Love Got to Do with It” Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
• “What’s Love Got to Do with It” Record of the Year
• “What’s Love Got to Do with It” Song of the Year
In 2020, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Turner merged sound and movement at a critical turning point in rock history, navigating and reflecting back the technological innovations of a new pop-music era in the ’60s and ’70s. She catapulted herself to the forefront of a musical revolution that had long marginalized and overlooked the pioneering contributions of African American women and then remade herself again [with Private Dancer] at an age when most pop musicians were hitting the oldies circuit. Turner’s musical character has always been a charged combination of mystery as well as light, melancholy mixed with a ferocious vitality that often flirted with danger.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Private Dancer, I share the album’s opening track, “I Might Have Been Queen,” accompanied by an excerpt from Ralph H. Craig III wonderful book, Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner.
I’m a new pair of eyes
Every time I am born
An original mind
Because I just died
And I’m scanning the horizon for someone recognizing
That I might have been queen
For every sun that sets there is a new one dawning
For every empire crushed there is a brand new nation
Let the waters rise
I’ve ridden each tide
From the gates of the city
Where the first born died
And I might have been queen
I remember the girl in the fields with no name
She had a love
Oh, but the river won’t stop for me
No, the river won’t stop for me
. . . I look up to the stars with my perfect memory
I lived through it all, and my future’s no shock to me
I look down, but I see no tragedy
I look up to the stars ’til I find my destiny
I look up to my past, my spirit running free
I look down, I look down, and I'm there in history
Oh, I’m a soul survivor
– From “I Might Have Been Queen”
Written by Jeannette Obstoj, Rupert Hine
& Jamie West-Oram, and recorded by Tina Turner
for her 1984 album, Private Dancer
Written by Jeannette Obstoj, Rupert Hine
& Jamie West-Oram, and recorded by Tina Turner
for her 1984 album, Private Dancer
[Manager] Roger Davies and Turner had one month to find songs for the album, producers to oversee the recording of songs, and professionals to take photos for the album’s cover and design artwork. . . . In [her 2020 book] Happiness Becomes You, Turner details how her song choices were “exercises in growth,” since if the song became a hit, she would have to sing it repeatedly. Therefore, she explained, “Before committing to a song, I would visualize how I might perform it onstage. I imagine it from start to finish before recording a single word.” By doing this, an act she considered to be “stepping outside my comfort zone," she was able to take ownership over her songs, “adding nuances that communicated a different meaning and subtext” to her audiences and expanding the song’s potential, along with her own. Expanding her own potential is a crucial spiritual concept for Turner, and such expansion exemplifies the Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist notion of human revolution.
. . . At Davies’s behest, Turner met with producer Rupert Hine and his songwriting partner Jeannette Obstoj. Turner narrated, especially to Obstoj, the story of her life that she first told to People magazine in 1981. Obstoj paid close attention to the role spiritual beliefs played in Turner’s life. In particular, she noted the prominence of Turner’s belief in her past life as [Egyptian queen] Hatshepsut. This belief placed her traumatic marriage to Ike Turner into the context of a therapeutic understanding of the past, the overcoming of which encouraged her dreams of future solo success. After listening to Turner, Obstoj, together with Hine and guitarist James West Oram, wrote the song “I Might Have Been Queen,” produced by Rupert Hine.
“I’m a new pair of eyes / Everytime I am born,” Turner sings in the opening line of the song (and as the first track on the album, the opening line of the album) – immediately signifying to the attentive lstener Turner’s adherence to the Buddhist belief in rebirth. “An original mind / Because I just died,” she continues, making clear to the listener what was only signified in the second line: in Buddhist belief, to be born, one must have first died. This cosmological cycle of birth and death, referred to as samsara in Buddhist doctrine, is considered to have no beginning. Encompassing both the cosmic and the sociopolitical scope of rebirth, Turner sings about the new dawns and new empires that arise after dissolution. She displays the confidence gained through her Buddhist practice and her work with psychic Carol Ann Dryer, when she confidently reminds the listener that she has ridden each wave throughout her lifetimes.
Then, in the chorus, her voice rings with power as she soars through time and space to sing the song’s title. When she sings of the rivers of time that carried her forward, we might imagine her speaking of the journey from ancient Egypt to the cotton fields of Nutbush, Tennessee, and now, to a recording studio in England making what may be the most crucial album of her life, this time around.
Having taken us through her past, in the final verse she sings of the future, referencing her belief in the predictive efficacy of astrology. Then, Turner sings of looking down from on high and seeing no tragedies, which evokes the Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist understanding of the awakened life-state, which is likened to a summit from which one is able to gaze on the world below with composure. Taken together, the lyrics of “I Might Have Been Queen” captures Turner’s spiritual understanding of the scope of her life, encompassing multiple lives in a broad sweep of history where the past is in context and the future is “no shock,” thereby enabling Turner to face her present with composure.
– Ralph H. Craig III
Excerpted from Dancing in My Dreams:
A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023
pp. 156-159
Excerpted from Dancing in My Dreams:
A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023
pp. 156-159
For more of Tina Turner at The Wild Reed, see:
• Rhone Fraser: Quote of the Day – May 24, 2023
• Remembering Tina Turner
• What Life Taught Tina Turner
• Remembering Tina’s Foreign Affair
• Tina Turner on “Changing Poison Into Medicine”
Related Off-site Links:
An Interview with Tina Turner – CBS News (1984).
Friday Night Videos’s “Private Reel” Interview with Tina Turner – WPCQ Channel 36 (September 14, 1984).
Tina Turner on Gaining Respect in the Music Industry – Anne Rohmer (CTV News, 1985).
An Interview with Tina Turner – NRK1 (January 31, 1987).
An Interview with the “Ageless” Tina Turner – Final Cut (1996).
Tina Turner’ South Africa Tour Documentary – 1996.
Tina Turner: Wildest Dreams Tour in South Africa Interview – The O Zone (1996).
Tina Turner Never Doubted That She’d Be a Superstar – Access Hollywood (1997).
An Interview with Tina Turner – The Jonathan Ross Show (October 2017).
Tina Turner: “My Love Story” – The Lost Interview – Tina Turner Blog (2018).
Tina Turner: The Making of a Rock ’n’ Roll Revolutionary – Daphne Brooks (The Guardian, March 22, 2018).
Tina Turner: A Legacy of Fire, Freedom and Fierce Resilience – USA Star News (May 31, 2025).
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