Mississippi Rolling Stone

IZEAR LUSTER "IKE" TURNER JR.

Named after his father, Isaiah (or Izear, as pronounced among the Black folks in the segregated South of Mississippi, .Clarksdale, in 1931), he was born to a local backwoods church reverend and a seamstress. Their son, whose mother called him Sonny, would later be nicknamed Ike by his peers.

Ike, at a very tender age, endured the loss of his father, who suffered a three-year-long agonizing death inflicted by a local White man, Bird-Doggin, and his fellow thugs, w...