Anna Mae formed an immediate and unfavorable opinion of this section of town: “I didn’t like East St. Louis,” Turner notes in her memoir. “It seemed like the South to me.” Her points of reference were the Black public entertainment spaces she had experienced as a child when her family would visit Ripley, the big town near Nutbush. On Saturday nights, Anna Mae, Alline, and their cousins would go to the movies while the adults got down to partying in a section of Ripley called the Hole, “the gaudy strip of black rib joints and boozy jukes down a cobbled back alley off Washington Street.” Turner’s description of the scene in the Hole in the late 1940s echoes depictions of Black leisure-time spaces that dotted the South:
There was all kinds of stuff going on down there—on the streets, in the bars, everywhere. Everybody had their best clothes on.…And the jukebox would be playing—boogie-woogie and blues—and the women would all be flirting and gyrating and dancing and smoking and drinking beer….There were fights down in the Hole, too, and they were scary… But it was all kind of wonderful, all that action down there in the Hole.
In East St. Louis, Anna Mae witnessed some of the same boisterous goings-on she had seen in the Hole, recounting “all that action”—eating, drinking, gambling, dancing—in the song “Club Manhattan.” The Club Manhattan could hold about 250 people; the stage was in the middle of the room, surrounded by tables. One wall featured a large painting of the Kings of Rhythm. On Anna Mae’s first night at the club, she took note of the fact that women made up the majority of the audience and, in a departure from the segregation that governed life in Nutbush and St. Louis, both Black and white women were in attendance. Her initial response to the Club Manhattan was a lack of interest, even a bit of boredom, but all of that changed when Ike Turner joined his band on the stage, emanating a charisma that she appreciated even though she did not find him physically attractive. “But there was something about him,” she explains. “Then he got up onstage and picked up his guitar. He hit one note, and I thought: ‘Jesus, listen to this guy play.’ And that joint started rocking. The floor was packed with people dancing and sweating to this great music, and I was just sitting there amazed, staring at Ike Turner. I thought, ‘God, I wonder why so many women like him? He sure is ugly.’ But I kept listening and looking. I almost went into a trance just watching him.” Drawn in by her first encounter with Ike and the Kings, Anna Mae, who had always loved to sing, set her sights on performing with the band.