For better or for worse, the name of Ike Turner will always be associated with that of his wife, Tina.

The best of their association was the series of dynamic pop-soul records they made together, capped by the monumental River Deep - Mountain High. The worst found Turner accused of mental cruelty and wife-beating in a long pattern of abuse that ended with their divorce after a 20-year marriage in 1978.

Even before he met his future wife, however, Turner had already played a seminal role in musical history, cutting a track called Rocket 88 in Memphis in 1951 with his band, the Kings of Rhythm, and the singer Jackie Brenston — it is widely cited as the world's first rock'n'roll record.

Turner was never noted for his modesty or self-restraint, but there was more than a grain of truth when in later years he titled his website, “Ike Turner: The Father of Rock'n'Roll”.

He was born Izear Luster Turner Jr in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931; his father was a Baptist minister and his mother a seamstress. Life in the segregated South was hard, and his father died when his son was young, after being beaten by a racist gang. He became a wild child, and well before his teens was involved in all manner of nefarious activities, including selling moonshine whiskey. But growing up in the Delta, he also absorbed the striking sounds of the region's blues musicians, such as Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, who lived on the nearby Stovall's Plantation.

At the age of nine he was taught to play boogie-woogie piano by Pinetop Perkins. Before long he had also taught himself guitar by playing along to blues records. He formed his first band, the Top Hatters, in school, and by the late 1940s they had become Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, playing juke joints all over the Delta and as far north as the clubs of Beale Street in Memphis. He also served a valuable apprenticeship backing such blues masters as Robert Nighthawk, an acquaintance of the great Robert Johnson, and Sonny Boy Williamson.

After a recommendation from B.B.King, one day in early 1951 Turner and his band turned up to cut their first record at the producer Sam Phillips's studio in Memphis (then called the Memphis Recording Service but soon to find fame as Sun).

The result was a fast boogie written by Turner on the spot called Rocket 88. With Turner pounding the piano virtually into oblivion, the lead vocal was sung by the saxophonist in his band, Jackie Brenston. Arguably, none of the individual elements on the record were new, drawing on the jump-blues and R&B styles of the time. Yet the record undeniably put them together in a way that was fresh, exciting and quite unlike anything that had been heard before. Three years later Phillips would discover and record Elvis Presley, but he always cited Rocket 88 as the record that marked the birth of rock'n'roll.

Phillips licensed the track to Chess Records in Chicago and by rights it should have been credited to Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. Instead, for some reason when the discs were pressed, the label read “Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats”.

Rocket 88 became a No 1 hit on the Billboard R&B chart, and Turner received $20 for his role, although what rankled more than the paltry sum was his lack of credit. Ultimately, however, he had the last laugh, for while he went on to fame and fortune, within a couple of years the hapless Brenston had sunk into obscurity.

Phillips was swift to recognise Turner's organisational as well as musical talents and employed him not only as a session musician but also as a talent scout and producer. Indeed, after Rocket 88, he became the linchpin of the Memphis musical scene, organising, producing and playing on sessions for the likes of Junior Parker, Howlin' Wolf, B.B.King, Otis Rush, Roscoe Gordon, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Johnny Ace, among others.

The rise of white rock'n'roll persuaded Turner in 1956 to swap Memphis for St Louis, where he formed a new Kings of Rhythm, who soon became the top draw in the city's nightclubs. He also continued to work prolifically as a producer and talent scout — and one night in 1957 at the Club Manhattan in St Louis he discovered a talent who was to make his fortune.

Ironically, when the 17-year-old Anna Mae Bullock asked to sing with the Kings of Rhythm, he initially refused her request. According to different stories, he either eventually relented in the face of her persistence or she simply grabbed the microphone. Whatever the truth, Turner knew immediately that he had found a big voice.

Renamed “Little Ann”, she joined his band, although at first she was featured on just three numbers. She also fell pregnant by the band's saxophonist, and when he abandoned her, she moved into Turner's house.

The band leader had already been married four times (although there is doubt as to the legal formality of some of these unions) and Tina — as she was now known — became his fifth wife in 1958. The following year she made her first recording with Turner's band on a song called A Fool in Love. It made No2 on the US R&B chart and crossed over to the mainstream Top 30, pushing her to the forefront of the group and prompting a name change to the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.

Further R&B hits followed, including I Idolise You, It's Gonna Work Out Fine, Poor Fool and Tra La La La La, and the revue became one of the most dynamic live shows on the circuit, with Tina complemented vocally and visually by a group of female backing singers dubbed the Ikettes — most of whom, it was rumoured, Turner had also bedded.

By the mid-1960s their chart success had dried up and the group drifted from one small independent label to another. But their fortunes took an upturn again in 1966 when they teamed up with the producer Phil Spector, who saw Tina's big, dramatic voice as the ideal vehicle for his own “wall of sound” style. The result was River Deep - Mountain High, a record on which Ike's input was minimal but which was Spector's finest hour. It remains a landmark in the history of popular music, but although it reached No3 in the British charts, unaccountably it flopped in the US. Spector was so disillusioned that he effectively retired from record production.

This left Turner back in charge of his wife's musical direction once more and the hits subsided again. However, a support slot of the Rolling Stones' tour of North America in 1969 led him in a new and lucrative direction as he astutely adjusted their sound to appeal to white rock audiences.

The following year, the duo signed with Liberty/United Artists and enjoyed considerable success recording covers of the Beatles' Come Together and Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary, the latter giving the duo their first US Top 10 hit in 1971. But the end of their partnership was near. Their final hit as a duo came two years later with Nutbush City Limits in 1973. Rumours had circulated for years of Turner's abusive behaviour and serial infidelity, and his wife eventually walked out on him in 1976 after a particularly bloody beating in Dallas, where they were performing.

She later revealed in her autobiography that as early as 1968 his cruelty had led her to attempt suicide. When their divorce was finalised in 1978, she fiercely asserted her independence by refusing to take any money from the settlement, leaving her husband the entire proceeds of their joint career.

While Tina rebuilt her career as a solo artist, her former husband retreated to his studio in Inglewood, California, and released a couple of uninspiring solo albums. But without her, his life was on the skids. His studio was destroyed by fire in 1982 and he sank into chronic drug addiction. He subsequently calculated that during the 1980s he spent $11 million on his cocaine habit, and in 1990 he was imprisoned on drugs charges.

He was still in jail when he and Tina were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the following year. After his release he returned to music, earning particularly good reviews for his 2001 album Here & Now, which was nominated for a Grammy award. In an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation, the same year he also wrote a less than reliable autobiography, Taking Back My Name.

Some critics have argued that Turner created little memorable music in his long career, claiming that his success was built on exploiting the greater talent of his wife and dismissing Rocket 88 as a freak accident. It's a harsh view that gained currency after the extent of his abusive behaviour towards Tina became known and is undoubtedly coloured by notions of political correctness.

To Turner's irritation, his reputation was further tarnished when he was portrayed by Laurence Fishburne as an untalented and vicious womaniser in the 1993 biopic about his former wife, What's Love Got to Do With It. He denounced the film and claimed that stories of his wife-beating were greatly exaggerated. Yet he did not deny his volcanic temper and, in one interview unrepentantly observed: “Ain't it part the woman's fault if she stays around and let's me hit her?”

He made a potent comeback last year with the release of Risin' With the Blues, a rollicking collection of blues classics, new songs and reworkings of some of his hits with Tina. In February this year the record won him a Grammy in the “Best Original Blues Album” category. The award, he felt, suggested that the music industry was finally recognising his contribution after years of ignoring him because of its disapproval of his personal life.

Few ever claimed that Turner was a nice man, but his personal failings cannot obscure the significant role he played in the development of blues, R&B and rock'n'roll. History would be unkind and unfair if it were to remember him only as “Mr Tina Turner”.

Ike Turner, musician, was born on November 5, 1931. He died on December 12, 2007, aged 76