Othar Turner — Gravel Springs, Mississippi

Othar Turner was born on June 2, 1908, near Gravel Springs in Marshall County, Mississippi, and was the last living practitioner of the North Mississippi hill country fife and drum tradition — a music distinct from the Delta blues, rooted in West African musical practices brought by enslaved people, and kept alive in the rural communities of northern Mississippi. Turner played cane fife (handmade from locally grown cane) with a drum ensemble, and his annual Gravel Springs Fife and Drum Picnics — held on his farm on Labor Day weekend — became legendary gatherings that attracted ethnomusicologists, rock musicians, and blues devotees.

Turner's farm in Gravel Springs was the last active site of this tradition's communal practice. The picnics featured his Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, extended improvisation, barbeque, and an atmosphere that seemed to reach back before recorded music. Jim Dickinson, the Memphis producer who worked with the Rolling Stones and Big Star, championed Turner's work; a recording for Birdman Records in 1998 and a subsequent Fat Possum session brought him wider attention in his final years. The Stones themselves visited the farm.

Othar Turner died in February 2003 at the age of 94. His granddaughter Sharde Thomas has continued the tradition with her own fife and drum group. The Gravel Springs farm is in Marshall County, close to the Tennessee border, in the hill country region of Mississippi that produced RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and the Fat Possum Records artists.