Como, Mississippi bluesman R. L. Boyce knew Fred McDowell, Otha Turner and Rainey Burnett personally, and was the last of a generation of bluesmen. Like his hometown, Boyce straddled the Hill Country and Delta styles of blues, a unique voice that did not fully fit into either category. Boyce began his career young, a teenaged drummer who played picnics with various fife and drum bands, including those of Napoleon Strickland and Otha Turner. As a set drummer, he was part of Jessie Mae Hemphill’s band, his style an incredible transference of the fife and drum percussion tradition to the drum kit. In his later years, he picked up the guitar, creating a hermetic body of work that was based around his ability to improvise lyrics based around current events and people he saw in the crowd. Boyce died in November 2023.
In August of 2024, Boyce’s daughter Sherena relaunched the annual R. L. Boyce Picnic at the Hulett farm in Tate County south of Senatobia. This year, renamed the R. L. Boyce Memorial Picnic, it returned to its original home in Como Community Park in the city of Como in Panola County. Despite extreme heat, attendees enjoyed free food and drink, the fife and drum music of the Otha Turner Boys, a band consisting of Otha Andre Evans, Mike G-Note Wooten and Demarcus D-Beats Bowden, as well as Monsieur Jeffrey Evans and his band, Robert Kimbrough Sr. and the Blues Connection, Earl “Little Joe” Ayers, and Duwayne Burnside. As always, it was a lot of fun, and there were no accidents or incidents.
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