Shardé Thomas

Otha Turner lights and smokes a cigarette at his rural North Mississippi home place as the drums play and fife whistles around him. Wearing overalls, he joyfully dances at his Gravel Springs farm in the tiny community of Como as his young granddaughter plays the fife.

When the performance ends, Shardé Thomas hands her grandfather a fife, and Turner leans down to kiss her forehead. Then he begins, with more sophistication, playing the instrument that grew out of the Mississippi soil.

“Are you the little girl in that film?” is a question Shardé, now 24, is often asked when performing around the country, and sometimes internationally, as the leader of the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band.

Today, she’s a singer, songwriter, musician, college student and, since Turner died in 2003, the last living link to the fife-and-drum blues music tradition.

“I started playing the fife when I was 7,” said Shardé, days away from performing at the annual Hill Country Picnic in Holly Springs. “I would go back and forth to my grandfather’s house and play every day. We had a very close connection. He stayed on the hill, and I stayed down the hill. Sometimes, he would stand on the top of the hill and yell down for me to come up.”

Her grandfather’s hard work and motivation inspired her to learn the fife.

“His way of teaching me fife was giving me the instrument and showing me how to place my fingers,” she said. “He never told me I was doing it right or wrong; he would just smile when I was doing it right. He wasn’t the kind who would sit you down and say, ‘Here’s what you need to work on.’ He just let me have my space, and I did it.”

Turner was the son of sharecroppers, and he spent most of his life farming. He taught himself to play fife as a teenager and began performing at local picnic celebrations in North Mississippi.

As the leader of the Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps, he hosted an annual Turner Family Labor Day Picnic at his farm, featuring barbecued goat and music that attracted locals and the occasional celebrity blues fan, such as singer Robert Plant or director Martin Scorsese, who later featured Turner in his documentary “The Blues.”

Turner’s fifes were made from cane he found growing wild on his farm. He cut it into pieces and burned holes in the cane with a hot poker. He won many awards for his fife-and-drum music, including a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage award and a Smithsonian Lifetime Achievement Award.

At age 90, Turner released his first CD “Everbody’s Hollering Goat,” and Rolling Stone magazine named it one of the top five blues albums of the decade. Four years later, Shardé, then 13, led her grandfather’s funeral procession, and in 2010, she released her first album “What Do I Do?”

In a BBC interview, Shardé compared the fife to “a magic wand” that can cast a spell on people.

Bret R. Pimentel, a music professor at Delta State University, said Turner’s fifes were made from a type of locally grown cane from the group Arundinaria. He said the fife is similar to a piccolo, which often is used in military band music. However, fife-and-drum music seems to be regional.

Greg Johnson, blues curator and associate professor at the University of Mississippi’s Blues Archive, said fife-and-drum music sounds like a fusion of West African drumming elements with American blues and ideas from gospel spirituals. The music was often ceremonial.

“After slowly roasting a goat in an earthen fire pit most of the day, no one was allowed to eat until the fife-and-drum music consecrated the grounds,” said Johnson. “It is also possible that military fife-and-drum bands of the American Revolutionary War and later American Civil War had an influence on the African American fife-and-drum tradition as well.”

While one can list the names of hundreds of guitar players from Mississippi, the fife has been limited to only a handful, Johnson said. They include Turner, Shardé and musicians Napoleon Strickland, Ed Young and Sid Hemphill.

“While people in the future could build a fife and perform this music from North Mississippi, would it be a continuation of the tradition or nostalgic recreation of a tradition?” he wondered. “Shardé is carrying on the tradition. It remains to be seen whether others will learn from her and help it continue.”

Alice Pierotti began working as the branch manager of the library in Como the week Turner received a Mississippi Blues Trail marker. She met Shardé that week, and they have continued a professional relationship. Shardé traditionally kicks off the summer library program in Como by leading her band in a parade down Main Street, and she participates in the library’s music program.

“She’s always been in the spotlight since she was nine, but I’ve seen her really mature over the last few years and become comfortable speaking in front of crowds,” Pierotti said. “People are just crazy about her. Being so young, she has a lot of people that look up to her and count on her, and that’s a lot of pressure to put on a young person, but she seems to handle it with grace.”

Pierotti said Shardé is a link to local culture.

“It’s kind of an odd thing,” she said. “There’s a lot of artistic and musical talent in Como. You could have a world-class singer in your library, and it’s the most amazing thing, and the most normal thing at the same time. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

“She’s such a link to the past and the Hill Country music that was played here. People around the world understand that, but I’m not really sure people in the community fully understand or appreciate that. It’s special and unspecial all the same time.”

Shardé also is a link to a way of life in North Mississippi, the communal nature of congregating.

“Music is a healer, and we have a lot of things to heal in this community,” Pierotti said. “Kids eat free lunches. There’s domestic violence and drug abuse, not to mention race relations. Music helps to fill in those chasms. The Turner Family Picnic is the best example of Panola County race relations that you will see in any environment. You don’t see it in church. You don’t see it in schools. You barely see it in daily life. You’d be hard-pressed to see different races interacting with one another, but it’s a different level when there’s a goat picnic.”

Some fear the fife-and-drum tradition could fade away if Shardé, a Delta State University elementary education student who aspires to become a teacher, chooses a life path that doesn’t include the fife. Pierotti doesn’t think that will happen.

“She’s under a tremendous amount of pressure to live up to all those expectations, but she’s getting better at coping with attention. The technical ability of what she can do with a fife is like watching a miracle. If we lost her, we would be losing a musical link to our heritage and culture,” Pierotti said.

Pierotti describes Shardé as a modest young woman who won’t tell you her depths.

“She doesn’t tell you a lot of the amazing parts of herself,” she said. “It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep a band together, and there’s a lot of family politics when you’ve got a big family like that. Shardé is a conduit for her family, a conduit for our community, a conduit for hill country music.

“Mr. Otha did a great job raising his family, and all his daughters have done a great job raising their families. They are top shelf character. Mr. Otha was just oozing with character, and subsequently, every generation that I’ve been exposed to, they are so open and revealing.

“They were remarkably equipped to be great representatives for that style of music. They are well-respected in the music community. Their music is so real, unscripted and unproduced. It’s raw, and that really resonates with some. You can’t manufacture genuine, and Shardé a good example of the most genuine kind of sound in music and human spirit.”

Shardé said she feels like the fife was handed down to her by her grandfather because he knew she would continue the tradition.

“When my grandfather passed in 2003, the whole band was in my hands,” she said. “Either I had to go forward with it or drop it and let it go. It wasn’t hard because I was still young, and at that age, I just wanted to play music. I just wanted to be out there and be heard. As I got older, I had to decide whether to hang with my friends or play with the band.”

Fortunately, her friends loved it, and they came to the picnics to watch her perform. They were excited that their friend was traveling the country and performing as a professional musician in such places as New Orleans, New York, Chicago and abroad.

“I think I was the chosen one because (Turner’s) grandchildren could have picked up the tradition,” she said. “His kids could have picked up the tradition. His friends or people who knew him personally could have.

“But I think, in his mind, he knew I could take it to that level. He knew when he passed it on, I would keep it going. I don’t know what he saw in me, but I’m glad I was chosen to take over.”

It might be because Shardé is determined and innovative. This has served the Senatobia native well in music and school. While attending Independence High School, she was a member of the band and played flute. She graduated in 2008 before enrolling at Delta State.

When she isn’t studying, she’s a Rising Star in a band of three drummers and a base player. She plays the fife and sings lead vocals.

“If I see something that needs to be done, I’m going to give it 100 percent,” she said. “Me being at a young age, I try to reach all the audiences, young and old, just to keep that music alive. If you get to the point where it’s dying down or people don’t want to hear it anymore, we can spice it up for the next generation, but also keep the traditional part that would keep them wanting to buy our records and coming to our shows. Each step you make is always a challenge, but I always try to leave a good impression with the crowd or hit them with a bang.”

“I don’t think that she would be able to put the fife down. She may not do the goat picnic every year. She might not lead our fife-and-drum parade down Main Street, but music is inside of her. It’s inside so many members of her family. It can’t leave them. It has to spill out of them.”

Alice Pierotti

STORY LaReeca Rucker
PHOTOGRAPHY Mike Stanton
ILLUSTRATIONS Katherine Fields