Otha Turner

Master of the homemade fife

Otha Turner, fife player: born Jackson, Mississippi 1907; married (four children); died Gravel Springs, Mississippi 26 February 2003

The fife player Otha Turner was the last surviving master of an African-American musical tradition that predates the blues. As the leader of the Rising Star Fife and Drums Corps, he formed a bridge between modern country blues and the West African music from which it developed. Drawing on 19th- century martial music and the sound world of the slaves, Turner's music was passing into virtual extinction even as he performed it.

He was born, he believed, in 1907. His father deserted the family shortly after his birth and he spent his formative years working alongside his mother in the cotton fields of northern Mississippi. He learned to play the fife in his teens, later recalling:

We was in Panola picking cotton when it came up a foggy rain. We grabbed our cotton sacks and headed for the house. Mr R.E. Williams, a tall, brown-skinned man, was playing music on a piece of fishing-pole cane. "What's that you blowin'?" I said. "It's a fife." I thought a fife was a dog, but I asked him would he make me one and he said he would if I minded my mama.

He played at local picnics and church socials and eventually made enough money to buy the acreage he farmed for the rest of his life. He continued to perform whenever he could, often working with other leading figures in the genre, including Sid Hemphill, Freddy Brooks and Napoleon Strickland, and for decades made his own fifes from the canes growing wild on his land.

In 1969, David Evans of the Library of Congress made field recordings of Turner, but it wasn't until 1998 that he cut his first album, Everybody Hollerin' Goat. The disc garnered critical acclaim and was followed, in 2001, by Otha Turner and the Afrossippi Allstars: from Senegal to Senatobia, on which he and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps were joined by a group of Senegalese musicians. Their fusion of fife, drums, slide- guitar and the African kora served further to underline the musical connections involved and remains a fascinating listening experience.

Turner, whose first name was also spelled Othar, appeared to enjoy his celebrity. Blues fans from around the world visited Gravel Springs for his annual Labor Day picnic, drawn not only by the music, but also by his famed barbecued goat. Hollywood, too, beckoned. He was considered for the role of the blind prophet in the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? project and, more recently, can be heard playing his fife in the opening sequence of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

Paul Wadey