Rising Star Fife & Drum Band

African survival

by James M. Manheim

posted 10/1/2004

Othar (or Otha) Turner died in February 2003 at ninety-five. He learned to make and play a bamboo cane fife as a youth, from an old man who told him that the drumming that accompanied the fife came from Africa. Turner worked a small farm in northern Mississippi for most of his life, and most of what he and his family ate, he raised. Asked to perform for a

Arts and Entertainment reviews and news.