While Othar Turner was born in Rankin County, MS in 1907 he lived the majority of his life in Gravel Springs near to Como and Senatobia. He grew up going to fife and drum gatherings and by watching other players he soon learned how to build and blow a cane fife of his own. He often was seen playing drums with Napoleon Strickland’s band and when he was too ill to play Turner started his own band. Turner upheld the tradition of the fife and drum until his death in 2003. Sharde Thomas, Othar Turners granddaughter, was 12 years old when he passed away. She took up the fife blowing in the Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps and continues to do so.
This is what Othar Turner says about how he learned to play music…
I started on a tin tub. Beat it with sticks. Take my hand and beat that drum and take me some sticks and went to doing just what the next fellow doing. Practiced and practiced till I got my right lick. Not just pecking on the drum, you got to play tunes on the drum. That’s right. So I learned ’em. I started playing on the tin tub when I was fifteen years old, and when I started playing the drum, I was seventeen.
And I learnt myself to blow the fice {fife}.
So I got me a cane and got me a nail. Just plain cane. Started to boring my holes; I couldn’t make none out of that. so I went and got me a thick piece of wire and put in the stove to burn the holes in there. My mama then come: “Get out of the way, boy! What you doing?” I said, “I”m trying to make me a fice.” “Oh, you ain’t going make you no fice. You don’t know how to make a fice.” I said, ” Mama, I’m going make me a fice. I’m going learn how to blow this cane.” I learnt.
Othar Turner’s Rising Star Fife & Drum band (Turner, fife; G.D. Young, bass drum; E.P. Burton, snare; Eddie Ware, snare) playing a picnic at Othar’s farm. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in Gravel Springs, Mississippi, August 1978.
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