Buika: From rags to stardom

More than a decade ago, Concha Buika came to America with only a dream and a voice.

Born in Majorca, a tiny island off the coast of Spain, to parents who fled Equatorial Guinea as political exiles, she had only traveled around Europe.

“I’d been singing with this orchestra of American musicians and they said, ‘You should come back with us, we’ll find work for you,’” she remembers.

So in 2000, she wound up in Las Vegas looking for a paycheck, like so many starry-eyed singers before her.

At her first audition, the talent scout recommended “surgery to increase my breasts.” Another gig required non-stop dancing, something “I’m not so good at,” she says.

Then she found herself warming up one afternoon to impersonate Tina Turner.

“I needed to find a job and that’s the job I found,” she says. “My 2-year-old baby was in my little apartment and there was no food in the refrigerator. I was with no money in my pocket. I asked Tina Turner, her spirit, to help me. Otherwise I’m going to be out on the streets with my baby and this is not even my country.”

After she tore through “Proud Mary,” in the charcoal-smoky voice that has become her signature, “everyone applauded.” For the next six months, she would careen from Harrah’s to the Luxor and Gold Coast casinos as the waifish Spanish-African version of Tina Turner.