By Steve Bergsman

Tina Turner didn't write many songs, but there was one of which she was particularly proud, a little hell-rouser called "Nutbush City Limits." While it seems like an odd title for a song, it is semiautobiographical, as Tina grew up in Nutbush, little more than a waystation in the West Tennessee delta region along State Highway 19, now called the Tina Turner Highway.

The song's opening lines read: "A church house, gin house/ a schoolhouse, outhouse/ on Highway No. 19/ the people keep the city clean/ they call it Nutbush, oh Nutbush/ they call it Nutbush city limits/ Nutbush city."

Recently, I took a ride down the highway and stopped off in Nutbush, which is even less a town today than when Turner lived there. The gin house still stands as a boarded marker. There are also the remains of a small store, an old industrial plant and not much more.

The story about the young Tina (real name Anna Mae Bullock) is that her parents went off to work in Knoxville during World War II and she went to stay with her paternal grandparents in Nutbush. The grandparents were religious, the deacon and deaconess at the Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church, a small, square structure painted white that also still stands.

My co-pilot was Deshon Jones, a young man out of Atlanta who is a committed Turner aficionado and had taken this ride many times. The history of the church, he explained, is a little complicated because it used to be a shared building going back to the Civil War. White religious denominations used the building on Sunday mornings, and the black religious groups used it on Sunday evenings.

Then the black congregation moved to a new location farther down the road. The new building was bigger and made of brick instead of wood. Today the Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church and Cemetery is on the U.S. Register of Historic Places, as it has a long, colorful history of emancipation, freedmen and the formation of National Negro Baptist Convention at the end of 1800s.

Jones suggested we take a detour and make a visit. As we walked toward the church, he saw a woman dressed in a pink mumu arduously making her way up a small flight of stairs to the back door.

"I know that woman," he exclaimed, and we hurried to meet her. The woman was Robbie Brack Jarrett-King, who was a childhood friend of Turner's and sang with her in the church choir. When I asked for a tour of the church she demurred at first and then jumped right into it, finding photos of Turner's grandfather and showing me where she would have sat while in the junior choir.

"Tina had a lot of energy," Jarrett-King recalled, "and she was an aggressive cheerleader." Most importantly, she added "She sang alto and had a melodious voice."

The two of us sat together in the choir seats as she reminisced.

"I was class of 1957 Carver High School."

Then she stopped, unsure if Turner was a grade ahead and whether she graduated or had left Carver early.

After Nutbush, Jones and I pushed westward to the small town of Ripley, where Turner also resided with her father's family. Ripley was more a town, with a commercial area surrounding a town square, home to the county courthouse.

Another great musician, Sleepy John Estes, also spent time in Ripley. It was a good place for the blues guitarist as the town certainly was sleepy. There was not much alive downtown, although Jones and I had found a good ribeye sandwich at Kissell's Kitchen.

We didn't stop again until Covington, another small burg, a little bigger than Ripley with another historic town square. Covington was home to the legendary Stax Records and singer Isaac Hayes, who won an Academy Award for the theme song to the movie "Shaft."

Figuring we needed to ask a local about anything in Covington to see, we wandered into a barber shop and asked about Hayes, only to be informed that his boyhood home had been torn down.

We made our way back to Brownsville, where we had started out. The last time I had been through here, the town had made a valiant effort to restore the one-room schoolhouse, Flagg Grove Elementary School, where Turner spent her elementary years. The building had been moved to the visitors center and still was boarded up. Four years later it was open to the public with a handsome museum of Turner's life, including many of the famous outfits she wore in concerts.

I had been invited to town to sign my books, one of which introduced the world to local blues singer Linzie Butler. During the course of the day I met three more women who were school chums of Turner, one of whom told me a story of the rambunctious Tina doing a cartwheel in the school's hallway with her foot landing in the face of another student and causing blood to flow.

"How do you remember Tina?" I asked.

Her old school friend responded with one word, "Hyper."

WHEN YOU GO.

Admission to the Tina Turner Museum in Brownsville is free. For more information visit www.roadsideamerica.com/story/45110.

(SET CAPTION) A yearbook photo shows Tina Turner (Anna Mae Bullock) as she looked in high school. Photo courtesy of Steve Bergsman. (END CAPTION)

Steve Bergsman is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.