Watch Tina Turner Play Her Final ‘Proud Mary’ at Last Concert in 2009
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The devastating news of Tina Turner’s death at age 83 was announced Wednesday. She’d been dealing with serious medical issues for much of the past decade, including intestinal cancer, but she successfully received a kidney transplant from her husband, Erwin Bach, in 2017, and at least in the public eye, seemed to be on the mend. She looked healthy and happy at recent appearances, including her 2021 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock & Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland,” her family said in a statement. “With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”
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Turner was undoubtedly one of the greatest live performers in music history. She nearly managed to upstage the Rolling Stones when she opened up for them on their legendary 1969 North American tour, and she packed stadiums all throughout the Eighties and Nineties. She announced she was retiring in 2000 and played 121 shows that year, but she came back in 2008 for one final tour, to commemorate her 50th anniversary.
“I was at the Armani show in Milan just chatting with Sophia Loren,” Turner told Oprah in 2008. “I told her I was taking a break. She said, ‘For how long?’ I said, ‘Oh, seven years.’ She said, ‘Break over. People want to see you. Get back to work.'”
The push from Loren got her thinking about a comeback, but she wasn’t sure until she played at the Grammys with Beyoncé. “After the Grammys, when I got home to Zurich, people would come up to me in the restaurant, in the ladies room, on the street, everywhere,” she said. “I started getting lots of little slips of paper and napkins with notes from fans. Some of them were so touching about my life, or a song and how it helped them. Each time I kept the note, and suddenly there was a pile. I called my manager and said, ‘It’s time!'”
Turner put together a career-spanning show that featured big hits (“Private Dancer,” “The Best”), covers she made her own (“The Acid Queen,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”), and classics from her Ike & Tina days (“Nutbush City Limits,” “River Deep, Mountain High”). She was nearly 70, but she managed to play 90 concerts, and she danced throughout every single one of them like she was decades younger.
The tour ended on May 5, 2009, in Sheffield, England. This was before every member of the audience had a video camera on their phone, but one fan managed to capture “Proud Mary” from the end of the main set. This is a song that she played well more than 1,000 times throughout her career, but this is the final one. As you can see, it was spectacular. As a performer, Turner went out at the absolute top of her game.
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