Sharde Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band Live at @BristerFest...
Sharde Thomas leads the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band on stage at the Levitt Shell in Overton Park during Bristerfest in Memphis on Saturday April 27, 2013. The event was to raise money for...
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End of Summer Festival at Otha Turner’s Place, Gravel Springs, Senatobia MS,...
Otha Turner’s granddaughter Sharde Thomas sponsored an End of Summer Festival yesterday at Otha’s Place on O. B. McClinton Road at Gravel Springs, which is just out from Senatobia and Como. The event...
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D J Fitzgerald Band Live at Otha’s Place, Senatobia, 7/27/13
I had not heard of the D J Fitzgerald Band until yesterday at SHarde Thomas’ End of Summer Party at Otha’s Place in Senatobia, but they are a good indie rock band from Senatobia, and some of their...
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82-Year Old Bluesman Leo Welch at Otha Turner’s Place, Senatobia, 7/27/13
I had never heard of Leo Welch before yesterday, but when the elderly man got on stage, he announced that he had been born in 1932, which he said was a “panic year.” Little Joe Ayers told me that...
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Sharde Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band Live at Otha’s Place,...
At any blues event, the arrival of Sharde Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band holds the crowd’s attention, and nowhere is this more true than at events at the Otha Turner homestead at Garvel...
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Dr. David Evans at the End of Summer Festival at Otha’s Place, Senatobia,...
Dr. David Evans, a professor emeritus at the University of Memphis, is one of the foremost ethnomusicologists in the country, but he is also a talented performer of pre-war blues styles as well.
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Ruby Wilson, the Queen of Beale Street, Live at Otha’s Place, Senatobia, 7/27/13
An unexpected treat at Saturday’s End of Summer Festival at Gravel Springs was the appearance of Memphis blues great Ruby Wilson. Her performance got the most applause of the night, although her show...
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Red White & Blues: Celebrating the Fourth With R. L. Boyce in North Mississippi
Since blues is one of the unique genres of music invented in America, I can think of few better ways to spend the Fourth of July than at a blues picnic. While there weren’t many public blues events in...
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Preserving the Black Fife and Drum Tradition at Gravel Springs
For fans of the blues in Mississippi, the summer is somewhat framed by two major events, the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic in June, which celebrates the Hill Country blues tradition, and the...
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Day 2 of the Otha Turner Picnic at Gravel Springs
The second day of the annual Otha Turner Picnic in Gravel Springs near Senatobia always falls on a Saturday, and brings out a larger crowd. This year, there were performances by Dr. David Evans, the...
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Juke Joint Festival: Andre Otha Evans Fife & Drum Band
Black fife and drum bands were once ubiquitous in the rural South, but time has not been kind to this style of music, a sort of precursor to the blues with heavy African influence. By 1970, only four...
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Preserving Endangered Traditions at Day 1 of the Otha Turner Picnic
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A Bigger Crowd at Day 2 of the Otha Turner Picnic
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The Hurt Family Celebrating The 4th of July With Fife and Drum
As I have discussed before in this blog, Black fife and drum music is an endangered form of pre-blues that probably played a role in the development of jazz as well as blues. Although the tradition...
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Keeping The Legacy Of Fife and Drum Music Alive
Each year, Sharde Thomas, the granddaughter of legendary fife-and-drum band leader Othar Turner, holds an annual picnic in her grandfathers’ memory at Gravel Springs, a community a few miles east of...
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Gravel Springs Block Party and Day 2 of the Otha Turner Picnic
The second day of the annual Otha Turner Picnic was much more crowded than the first, as crowds came out to hear such artists as R. L. Boyce, Kody Harrell, the French blues band Pin’s Downhome Blues,...
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Celebrating Tate County’s Blues Legacy at Senatobia Blues and Brews
On November 4, 2017, Senatobia launched its inaugural Blues and Brews festival in Gabbert Park, in unusually warm and wet weather. In fact, dense fog enveloped the whole park, and made it hard to see...
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Great Ribeyes Along The River Road at Rena Lara
For a city of nearly 20,000, Clarksdale, Mississippi is severely under-represented when it comes to restaurants, particularly fine dining. During Juke Joint Festival, the problem becomes more...
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R. L. Boyce Live at Senatobia’s Five Star City Festival
Spring is the festival season in North Mississippi, and each small town has some sort of spring festival with games, vendors and live music. Senatobia, Mississippi, in Tate County, has long been...
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Hill Country Traditions at the Hulette Picnic in Senatobia
Although it was the weekend of the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival in Clarksdale, R. L. Boyce’s daughter Sherena had mentioned something about a large birthday picnic and party near...
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