Blue Mother Tupelo at the Turner Family Picnic
Otha Turner's Farm, OB McClinton Road, Gravel Springs, Mississippi
This picnic is certainly an Otha Turner family tradition, an old time Mississippi tradition and a BMT tradition. BMT is honored to have made music & jammed with friends, at our friends, the Turners' farm for several years at this nonstop down home foot-stompin' picnic filled with great food, great folks and great music! - Past performers include: T-Model Ford, RL Burnside, Sam Carr, "Big Jack" Johnson, Kenny Brown, Robert Belfour, Terry "Harmonica" Bean, Cedric & Duwayne Burnside, Kenny Kimbrough, Rev. John Wilkins, "Slick" Ballinger, Steve "Lightnin'" Malcolm, Blind Mississippi Morris, Big Daddy, The North Mississippi Allstars, Blue Mother Tupelo and of course, the late great Otha Turner and his granddaughter, Sharde Thomas & The Rising Star Fife & Drum Band. The gathering of friends and the music is always fantastic and the catfish & goat bar-b-q are delicious! Ice-cold beer to top things off - it don't get no better than this! This year, the Turner family will carry on in the traditional picnic style with Otha's original Rising Star Fife and Drum and his granddaughter, Sharde Thomas, playing the fife and his grandsons playing the drums as well as countless other Hill Country and Delta Blues musicians. Blue Mother Tupelo will be jammin' there with others. At this picnic, there's never a schedule for performers and one NEVER knows who'll be performing for this event. But the music is nonstop and this is always guaranteed to be an old-fashioned Mississippi boogie. Y'all come!
Directions: On I-55, get off on the Senatobia exit and turn left (away from town) down Highway 4. Go approximately three Miles down that road to Gravel Springs Road (the second road to the right on 4 from Senatobia). Turn right on Gravel Springs Road. Go to the second 4-way stop and turn left (that road is OB McClinton Road) Follow that road about a half mile and the Turner's Picnic is on the right there will be lots of cars & people gathered there. Park along the side of the road.
Book your hotel a.s.a.p.. Area hotels almost always fill up ahead of time (the picnic location is about an hour's drive southeast of Memphis).
About Otha Turner:
"Renowned for his picnic parties Mr. Turner - who played a homemade bamboo cane fife or wooden flute and spent much of his life as a sharecropper and subsistence farmer - was a living link to rural Blues and fife-and-drum pre-blues that extended well into the 19th Century."
***HEADS UP, PLeaSE: We ARE NOT the LAST WORD on THE O.T. FAMILY PICNIC. WE ATTEMPT TO POST HELPFUL INFORMATION FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN ATTENDING, BASED ON OUR PREVIOUS EXPERIENCES & WHAT WE'RE TOLD BY THE FAMILY. PLEASE DOUBLE-CHECK WITH SHARDE THOMAS at: https://www.facebook.com/sharde.thomas.1 ON ANY FURTHER DETAILS