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Join us for a performance by the Sharde Thomas Rising Stars Fife and Drum Band, featuring the granddaughter of famed fife player Otha Turner, in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. DJ Andrew McCalla will be spinning records throughout night around the Rising Stars’ performance.
Tickets: $10
Doors at 7:30pm | Show at 8pm
About the artists:
National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow recipient and famed fife player Otha Turner— who founded the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band— loved telling the story of how his granddaughter Shardé Thomas simply strode up to him one day, grabbed a cane, and began blowing into it. Within a few years, Thomas was filling in at recording sessions and performing with Rising Star at picnics.
Thomas is now an American singer and fife player in her own right within the vanishing American fife and drum blues tradition. She still makes her fifes by hand out of cane, hollowing it out with a heated metal rod—just as Turner did. Within a region overflowing with musical talent, they stand apart as authentic practitioners of one of the most unique forms of American music. She calls the band “Rising Stars” because, she says, that’s what they are.
