A Tina Turner CD re-release popped out late last year but I’ve only just noticed. Bad me! The album Good Hearted Woman, which was originally recorded in 1974 and first released in 1979, reappeared in a fully remastered version with the originally-planned artwork in late November. (There’s also a vinyl reissue, if you must.)
To avoid confusion, this is not Tina Turns The Country On!, also recorded and released in 1974 and usually cited as Tina’s first solo album. As Tina’s former PA Eddy Armani explains in his liner notes for the reissue, this set of recordings was funded by investor Jack Millman and produced by Bob Scherl. Millman saw commercial potential for Tina as a solo act following the success of ‘Nutbush City Limits’, which was, like all Tina’s recorded output to that point, credited as an Ike & Tina Turner recording..
United Artists, which Ike & Tina Turner were signed with at this time, liked the concept of a country-flavoured Tina solo album, but not the actual recordings themselves. So Millman was given the rights to the tapes – which makes sense, he paid for their production – and Tina went on to work on Tina Turns The Country On! (which got its own CD reissue in 2024).
Five years later, Millman finally issued the recordings, on his own vanity label Wagner Records (the album and an associated single are the only documented releases for Wagner).
The timing, to be honest, was strange. As I’ve documented in detail, Tina’s career was in the doldrums at this time and she wasn’t selling records in any quantity.
Armani’s CD sleeve notes claim that “Her name as a solo artist was growing”, but after her 1979 album Love Explosion flopped, United dumped her. Perhaps that made Millman think United wouldn’t take legal action over the release.
However, once Tina’s career actually took of with Private Dancer in 1984, this set of tracks was endlessly reissued. Discogs lists 97 different variants, many of them evidently unlicensed.
I often saw versions of this in bargain bins in the 1990s and early 2000s. I wouldn’t be surprised to see ALDI have a crack at them at some point.
Anyway, Good Hearted Woman‘s title track is a Waylon Jennings/Willie Nelson composition, first recorded by Jennings in a solo version in 1972, which reached #3 on the Billboard country charts. It’s perhaps better known from the 1976 duet version by Jennings and Nelson, which reached #1 on the country charts.
Oddly, this version comprises a solo concert recording by Jennings mixed with a new vocal by Nelson and additional crowd noises. Dubiously-dubbed live recordings were very big in the mid-1970s, as KISS and Peter Frampton can attest.
What makes the song choice interesting is that, according to Jennings, Tina Turner actually inspired the song. Exactly how that happened remains a little murky, however.
The most commonly-cited story is the version Jennings recounted in an interview quoted in The Billboard Book Of Number One Country Hits in 1991.
I’d been reading an ad for Ike and Tina Turner and it said, ‘Tina Turner singing songs about good-hearted women loving good-timing men.’ I thought, ‘What a great country song title that is!’
Wille Nelson defined the circumstances more precisely in an undated interview reported in Dorothy Horstman’s 1995 songwriting history Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy.
This song was written in 1969. I was at the Fort Worther Motel in Fort Worth, Texas, playing poker with a man named Billy Gray. My wife, Connie, was there, and Waylon came in. He had the idea for the song and the first line. Waylon joined the poker game and told me about it. Connie took the words down as we played.
Ike & Tina Turner definitely did play Fort Worth at least once around that time. Here’s an advertisement for their 24 June 1968 performance from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Note the “good-hearted woman” quote doesn’t appear here.
In a 16 May 1974 profile in the Los Angeles Times, Jennings tells a slightly different story:
“Tina doesn’t know it,” Jennings said, “but I got that song from her. She said something once about good-hearted women loving hard-timing men. That’s where it came from.”
Three things to note from this much-more-contemporary report:
- We’re now seeing the phrase attributed to something Tina said, not an advertisement. That is much more plausible overall. It seems unlikely the high-energy Ike & Tina Turner Revue would be promoted by emphasising ballads.
- Jennings knew by May that Tina was doing the track, so she must have recorded it by then. Tina Turns The Country On! came out in September 1974 and was reputedly recorded in June, so things were moving quickly,
- Jennings appears to misquote his own words – the lyric says “good-timing men”, not “hard-timing men” – so we might want to treat the transcription with a grain of salt.
So the bottom line is: the claim this lyric was inspired specifically by an advertisement is not super-supported. We can’t find the ad, and in contemporary interviews Jennings said the source was a comment from Tina, not an ad. It’s clear she was a (partial) inspiration, but proceed with caution before repeating the tale wholesale.
Naturally, what I’d still like to see reissued are all the tracks Tina recorded between 1979 and 1983 that haven’t made it onto any of the recent CD re-releases. A man can dream.
A final pedant note: while some compilations including the Good Hearted Woman tracks include 16 songs, not 10, the remaining 6 are earlier Ike & Tina Turner revue recordings, not additional numbers from the Scherl-produced sessions.
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