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Otha Turner (also commonly known as Othar Turner) died on February 20th in hometown of Gravel Springs, MS, at the age of 94. Turner was a master of the homemade fife, a wooden flute usually made from a bamboo cane, and was loved for hosting an annual Labor Day picnic in the North Mississippi town that featured barbecued goat and live music.

His recognition among the folk, blues and roots music community stretches far and wide. Just this year, Otha was nominated for a W.C. Handy Blues Award for best instrumentalist. You could also find Turner at various festivals as the Beale Street Music Festival, the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Arkansas, the Center for Southern Folklore's Memphis Music & Heritage Festival, and the Chicago Blues Festival, among others. He even appeared on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Most recently, and perhaps more popularly, Turner's music can be heard at the beginning of the Oscar-nominated film Gangs of New York. A 2001 performance of his will appear in the forthcoming PBS series entitled The Blues.

Turner's Rising Star Fife and Drum Band practiced in a near extinct musical tradition that pre-dates, as well as influenced, the blues. Fife and Drum music has been called intoxicating-- characterized by an eerie and haunting whistle accompanied by heavy marching rhythm. It originates with the 19th-century military, using traditional African and African-American musical elements such as blues notes and syncopation, this according to scholar, producer, and musician David Evans, who recorded Turner for the Library of Congress in 1969. Prior to the Library of Congress recordings, folk music archivist Alan Lomax recorded Turner in 1959 and gave the world the first known recordings of this regional sound.

Turner first heard the fife when he was a teenager; as he tells it, he was picking cotton when he encountered a fife player. He asked the man what he was playing, then asked if he could make him one. The man told young Otha he'd make him a fife if he "minded his mama". The rest, as they say, is history. He built his reputation in Mississippi by hosting legendary musical picnics - a community gathering of goat barbecue and music, in which everyone was expected to participate. He released his first album in 1998. Called "Everybody Hollerin' Goat", it was picked by Rolling Stone as one of the five essential blues records of the decade.

Although not certain, it was generally agreed that he was 94. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia and heart trouble recently, but died at his daughter Betty's home. His family also reported that his daughter and 'Rising Star' band member Bernice also died later that night in a Memphis emergency room. She had not been told about her father's death. As time goes on, the world loses its links to the musical and cultural traditions of the past. We can hope that family, friends, and fans of Mr. Turner will keep his passion for his instrument as well as a fading musical tradition alive and well.