Otha Turner

Veteran bluesman Otha Turner was the last surviving master of the Mississippi back-country fife and drum tradition. He was born in 1908, spending his adult life as a sharecropper in the city of Como, an area several miles northeast of the Delta region which also gave rise to musicians including Fred McDowell, R.L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough. Beginning his performing career around 1923, Turner initially played the blues as well before picking up the thread of the fife and drum tradition, a primitive take on African-American hymns and songs which dates back to the northern M...