PHOTOGRAPH | BILL STEBER

HOUSTON INSTITUTE FOR CULTURE | FEATURED ARTIST

Napolean Strickland, Como, MS, 1993
Napolean Strickland has been described as one of the greatest fife players to emerge from a long history of African fife and drum music in the Mississippi hill country. Players like Strickland fashion their instruments by burning out the middle joint and the finger holes of a piece of riverbottom cane with a hot poker. The fife player leads a group of drummers through a parade ground observing an intricate choreography handed down through the generations. Slaves in this country first adopted the fife and drum from Scottish military music in pre-Revolutionary days. History records that Thomas Jefferson's own personal body servant organized a small group to rally the revolutionary war effort. What distinguishes this music from it's European ancestry is the polyrhythmic drum patterns and expressive fife melodies that owe more to African musical tradition. A version of this music is still common in West Africa and the West Indies, but performances in this country, though once common throughout the South, are now concentrated in the Gravel Springs community of Northeast Mississippi.