Otha Turner

Veteran bluesman Otha Turner stood as the final living exponent of Mississippi’s rural fife-and-drum lineage. Born in 1908, he worked for decades as a sharecropper in Como, a town lying several miles northeast of the Delta and the same locale that produced Fred McDowell, R.L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough. He launched his musical life around 1923, first performing blues before turning to the older fife-and-drum practice—an elemental rendering of African-American hymns and songs rooted in the northern Mississippi hill-country culture of the 1800s. After mastering the fife, a simple bamboo-cane flute, he spent the next six decades largely unnoticed while directing the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band, an informal ensemble of family members, friends, and neighbors who performed chiefly at farm picnics. The group also opened the Chicago Blues Festival each year for an extended period. By the 1990s Turner remained the sole surviving connection to the tradition’s origins, as his peers had either passed away or become incapacitated. His music reached a wider audience for the first time with the 1998 release of Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, assembled by producer Luther Dickinson from sessions captured between 1992 and 1997. A second collection, Senegal to Senatobia, followed in 2000; departing from earlier roots-oriented material, it placed the veteran fife player alongside Dickinson on slide guitar and Senegalese kora musician Morikeba Kouyate. That proved to be Turner’s final recording. He died on 26 February 2003 at the age of 94. The reach of his late-career revival was underscored when his piece “Shimmy She Wobble” appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York.