For 75 years, there has been a Labor Day picnic in Tate County, Mississippi, featuring barbecued goat and fife and drum music. The tradition was started by the late Otha Turner, an area farmer and the leader of a local fife and drum band called the Rising Star, which over time became nationally and internationally known. For most of the early years, the picnic was held at Otha’s farm on the O. B. McClinton Road in the Gravel Springs community east of Senatobia. Otha Turner died in 2003, and the event has been continued by his granddaughter Sharde Thomas, who now leads the fife and drum band. She has in recent years moved the picnic into the town of Coldwater, Mississippi, and this year the event was held at the Shriners Club on Highway 51.
While I could not get up the courage to eat goat, this year’s festival was exciting and fun. David Evans and his Last Chance Jug Band was on stage when I arrived, and Sharde Thomas and her husband Christ Mallory were being interviewed about the event I soon ran into Joe Ayers, who introduced me to Dr. Sylvester Oliver, the ethnomusicologist who wrote a massive two-volume dissertation on Black music in Marshall County, Mississippi. I found it very interesting to meet him and talk with him.
The jug band was followed by Memphis dixieland jazzers the Side Street Steppers, and Mississippi rockers Proud Hound, but the most amazing discovery of the night was the band Cash’s Juke Joint, of Macon, Georgia, featuring blues guitarist Angel Ocasio Jr., whose playing and singing were both phenomenal. At a time when many young blues artists have trouble writing material in the tradition, Ocasio’s originals were authentically blues songs, and well written.
Between each act, the Rising Star came to provide fife and drum during set changes, and I was especially thrilled when they were joined by the Next Generation, the group of family relatives who are learning to play the snare and bass drums and djembe. Black fife and drum is a threatened and endangered tradition, and getting young people involved is essential in preventing its extinction.
The night was closed out with Duwayne Burnside and his band. Duwayne, a son of the late bluesman R. l. Burnside, is one of few remaining adherents to the Hill Country style of blues, and delivered a rocking set to end out the night, joined by Hattiesburg up-and-coming bluesman Shakedown. And thus the curtain fell on the 75th year of the GOAT Picnic.