Ike Turner Jr., the son of Ike and Tina Turner who won a Grammy for traditional blues album in 2007 as a producer on his father’s album “Risin’ With the Blues,” has died. He was 67.
Turner died Saturday at a Los Angeles hospital from kidney failure, family member Jacqueline Bullock told TMZ. She said the musician had been battling heart issues for years and had a stroke last month.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of my cousin, Ike Turner, Jr.,” Bullock said in a statement to the New York Post. ‘”Junior’ was more than a cousin to me, but rather a brother, as we grew up in the same famed household together.”
“As the son of Tina and Ike Turner, from an early age, his talents were evident as there wasn’t an instrument he did not want to play,” the statement continued. “Eventually, Junior would end up helping to run Bolic Sound Studios, the recording studios founded by his father, Ike Turner.”
A musician, producer and sound engineer, Turner was pulled into the music business by his father when he was 13.
“My father took me out of [the] house and out of school and I traveled [with them],” Turner said in a 2017 interview on “The Bobby Eaton Show.” “That wasn’t no easy work.”
In that same interview, he also shared the role his mother Tina played in the instruments he picked up in his youth.
“My first instrument was drums, until my mother started making me break my drums down every day,” he said. “The piano was always there in the family room, so I started playing piano. I play guitar and bass. Everything except horn because horn used to make me dizzy from blowing air.”
Turner was one of four children associated with Ike Sr. and Tina Turner’s famed union, which ended with the latter filing for divorce in 1974 (finalized in 1978). The couple performed together from 1960 to 1976 as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, but their musical achievements were often overshadowed by the former’s abuse.
Born in 1958 to Ike Turner Sr. and Lorraine Taylor, Ike Jr. and his brother Michael were adopted by the “What’s Love Got to Do With It” singer upon her marriage in 1962 to their father. Their siblings also included Ronnie and Craig.
“Tina raised me from the age of 2,” Ike Jr. told the Mail on Sunday in 2018. “She’s the only mother I’ve ever known.”
Over the years Turner had commented a number of times on his estrangement from his mother since his parents’ divorce. In 2018 he said he had not spoken to her in nearly 20 years.
Turner was preceded in death by both of his parents and two of his siblings. His father died in 2007 of a cocaine overdose and Tina died in 2023 after a long illness. Craig Turner died by suicide in 2018 and Ronnie Turner of complications related to late-stage cancer in 2022.
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