The Music of the Rivercane

Exploring the Indigenous origins of Hill Country Fife and Drum Music, and the instrument at its heart

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Chickasaw flute player Jesse Lindsay tells a story about the origin of rivercane flutes. At one point in the distant past, a man lost his lover and, feeling dejected, went and sat by the river’s edge. The wind was blowing, and after a while, he saw a woodpecker come and peck holes in rivercane looking for bugs. As the wind blew, the cane made music, a gift from the Creator.

As members of the Choctaw (DePriest) and Atakapa-Ishak (Darensbourg) nations and scholars on Native cultures, our journey with rivercane flutes began with our love of North Mississippi Hill Country Fife and Drum music, and the realization that it certainly had an Indigenous influence. 

How could it not? The fife that the performers play is made of rivercane, Arundinaria gigantea, and these flutes closely resemble those made by Gulf South Native Americans for millennia. The slinky, slithering style of dance associated with Hill Country performers even resembles the Choctaw snake dance, with elements of the friendship dance of the Chickasaws, on whose land present day North Mississippi is located. This music features booming marching band drums, with rhythms loud and rapid, accompanying a single flute, whose melodies are heard over it all. 

Of course, the practice of making flutes out of hollow materials is common around the world and has been for a long time. The flute is one of humanity’s oldest instruments. There are also fife and drum traditions in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere in the Americas.

As for the Hill Country Fife and Drum style in particular, most origin stories claim it is descended from military bands that marched during the Revolutionary War. While this claim is hard to definitively disprove, it seems unlikely that the only remnant of these martial bands almost 250 years later is in an isolated African-American community in North Mississippi. 

According to Shardé Thomas, the granddaughter of the legendary fife performer Otha Turner and present-day leader of the Rising Stars Fife and Drum band, “the fife and drum came from Africa.” In a 2013 interview, she is quoted as saying that in Africa today, “[t]hey play it in different styles; it’s totally different than how we do it now” in Mississippi. 

Many traditions associated with African Americans of the Gulf South, from food (red beans and cornbread), to forms of zydeco dancing that derive from the Native stomp dances, have Indigenous roots. These histories, after all, were intertwined. Native and African peoples were enslaved together across the Gulf South. They had families together and struggled for liberation side by side.

It seems likely that what differentiates the Hill Country style developed in place, from people who have ancestors from both Africa and local Indigenous communities, or at least influence from both. Such a mixture in American music is common. Prominent musicians of both African and Native American ancestry include classic artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Charley Patton, James Brown, Kid Ory, Howlin’ Wolf, and Fernest Arceneaux, as well as contemporary performers Cedric Watson, Radmilla Cody, Martha Redbone, and on and on. The Native American influences on both blues and rock and roll are deftly examined in the 2017 documentary Rumble: the Indians Who Rocked the World. Zydeco, another southern musical form, has origins in both African American and Native American cultures of southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas. The most distinct feature of the Hill Country Fife & Drum genre however, is its instrumentation—and especially its flute.      

The oldest known rivercane flute was found in Arkansas. Known as the Breckenridge flute, it’s likely around 1,000 years old, but Native people in the southeast have been playing flutes of various materials for much longer. Over time, rivercane flutes, like other organic materials, dry out, crack, and turn to dust, to be replenished with each new crop and each new generation.     

Thanks to filmmakers Bill Ferris, David Evans, and Judy Peiser, there is documentation of Otha Turner, the master craftsman of fife and drum flutes, making an instrument from start to finish. He begins by collecting thick culms of rivercane. After sidling back to his farm at Gravel Springs, he trims the cane to prepare the flute. His measurements are exact and finely tuned from years of practice; he uses only his hands and experience to determine where the finger holes belong, and a knife to mark them for later burning. Once the holes are marked, he heats up a metal rod to clear them out, making them the proper width for playing while strengthening their edges through charring. 

It’s important to note that unlike most traditional Native flutes, Turner’s flutes, or fifes, are transverse, meaning that they are played across the opening like a classical flute, rather than end-blown like a penny whistle or a recorder. For this reason, these flutes are more difficult for a novice to pick up and play. But once a sound comes out, the tone is rich and powerful. 

In a typical fife and drum ensemble, there is only one fifer and three drummers: these flutes are loud. Turner talks about hearing the music coming from Hill Country “picnics” from up to six miles away. In case your neighbors didn’t get the word that you’re having a flute party ahead of time, they’ll know when it begins. These picnics still happen, with a major one annually, the GOAT Picnic, held in honor of Otha Turner in Coldwater, Mississippi on Labor Day Weekend.

Hoping to find cane to craft our own flutes in the spring of 2023, we sent a message to  “Mr. Tom” Colvin, a community elder for Indigenous people of Louisiana, who has worked with the plant for decades. We wondered if he knew of any secret canebrakes up on the northshore of Lake Pontchartrain. While waiting for his reply, we drove to our own secret spot in southern Mississippi—where the cane is thinly spread on the banks of an obscure stream bed, mostly small, but interspersed with a few larger culms big enough for a decent flute. We gathered some, listening for the warning of sinthollo, the diamond-back rattlesnake, who let us pass unhindered that day.

On the way back, we noted how odd our Native ancestors would have found it to have to travel so far to find cane. We drove an hour and a half from Bulbancha, as our Indigenous ancestors have called it, “The Place of Other Languages,” otherwise known as "New Orleans" in popular parlance. The French Quarter, where one of us lives, was once a canebrake, and on March 7, 1699, when Iberville and his crew rounded a turn in the river, becoming the first Europeans to see that place, they witnessed bison napping on the shore, and a group of Biloxi people working a controlled burn of a field of rivercane. Iberville described the scene as follows: “Both banks of the river … are so thickly covered with canes of every size… that one cannot walk through them…when set on fire they burn readily and, when burning, make as loud a report as a pistol shot.”

Three centuries later, we can’t just stroll over to the riverwalk and harvest it. Rivercane is a leftover, volunteer domestic crop. Native Americans transformed the lands of the Americas with sophisticated land management and agricultural engineering, producing some of the world’s most noteworthy foods, including corn, tomatoes, and chocolate. Rivercane is a similarly engineered plant, adapted to human tending. According to the USDA, rivercane has lost over 98% of its historical range, largely due to grazing and erosion, but also due to another aspect of modern American life: the suppression of controlled wildfires, a principal method of tending the cane. Rivercane needs fire. Fire burns the dead culms and clears out the surrounding underbrush to help the cane spread. Suppress the fire; suppress the rivercane. 

"I’ve had people tell me that when they started making flutes, it gave them some control over some aspect of their life, and that has made it all worth it.” —Charlie Mato-Toyela

Flutes aren’t the only objects crafted from rivercane. Basket weaving is a long-standing tradition still practiced by many Native people in the Gulf South, including members of the Bayou Lacombe and Jena Choctaw communities, as well as Chitimacha artisans around Charenton and Tunica-Biloxi culture bearers in Marksville. Blow guns are still made with rivercane, too, including by Houma craftspeople, some of whom are teaching their craft to the younger generation. There is now even an annual Rivercane Gathering, a collaboration between Southeastern Native communities and the US Forest Service attempting to turn the tide of rivercane endangerment.

[Read more about traditional Chitimacha rivercane basket weaving in this story from our January 2022 issue.]

On the way back from Mississippi, we heard from Colvin, checked his recommended spot, and sure enough, found the cane right away, much closer to the city. Still, the point remains: rivercane is hard to find.

Searching for how to make rivercane flutes online, one will quickly stumble across Blue Bear Flutes, founded by Cherokee flute maker Charlie Mato-Toyela. Based out of Dothan, Alabama, Mato-Toyela has been cutting or cultivating cane ever since he was a child. For much of that time, he’s also been crafting flutes—using techniques he learned from his grandfather.Today, he has made many thousands of these flutes. 

Generous with his knowledge, he dedicates a substantial amount of time to creating educational videos about the flute making process, using both wood, rivercane, and some less traditional materials, including PVC. He often sends flutes to tribal members who are interested in connecting with this cultural tradition. “There’s a lot of things that are gonna be gone,” he said. “If you find out there’s a part of your culture that you haven’t seen in years, you really want to see it. It’s really valuable to you.” And, he added, it keeps people buying flutes, even from other flute makers. “And it helps people grow. I’ve had people tell me that when they started making flutes, it gave them some control over some aspect of their life, and that has made it all worth it.” 

Mato-Toyela’s process is only slightly different from Turner’s. “Most flutes are a copy of a copy of a copy”, he says, referring to using patterns and measurements from existing flutes to make new ones. But when, as a child, he asked his grandfather about where to make the holes; his grandfather responded that they could go wherever Charlie wanted. Eventually this led to a greater sense of freedom in Mato-Toyela's flute making and a sense that he could be more creative with the process. 

Using a heated metal dowel rod, he reams out the finger holes. The main difference between his process and Turner’s is that Mato-Toyela clears a track to direct the air. These are end-blown flutes, and while generally not as loud, they have the same amount of expressive range as the Hill Country flutes. 

It turns out that these two styles of flute—the Hill Country fife and the traditional Native flute—are quite similar. There are similar numbers of holes (most often five), and the material is the same, as is much of the process. 

In the fall of 2023, we caught word that Blue Bear Flutes had stopped selling rivercane flutes commercially. We figured that it must be due to its declining abundance and availability. However, when we called Mato-Toyela to ask, he said “No, I still know a few spots where I can find it. The problem is that people don’t take care of them.” He went on to explain that despite the level of care, tradition, and craftsmanship he infuses into making the rivercane flutes, people don’t seem to value them or take care of them as well as they would flutes made of other materials. “I would just be spending all of my time repairing flutes that people didn’t properly take care of.” 

The undervaluing of important Native traditions such as flute making is nothing new. But despite a previous waning of this tradition across the Southeast, these days there are an ever-growing number of artisans and craftspeople who are building and playing flutes—inspiring younger musicians to do the same. 

Our own forays into rivercane harvesting and flute making are inspired by a mutual desire to preserve these ancient traditions for our own cultural descendants. 

And we are just getting started.