It sounds like nothing else in American music: a single cane fife weaving a melody over a battery of bass and snare drums, the rhythm rolling and shifting in ways that owe more to West Africa than to any European march. Hill country fife and drum music is among the oldest surviving African American traditions in the country, and it now lives on at only a few summer picnics scattered through the hills east of the Delta.

These are not concerts. They are gatherings, held on family land, where the music is one part of a long day of cooking, visiting, and dancing. The drums start in the afternoon and can run until well past dark, the players trading off as arms tire.

For years, scholars have warned that the tradition was one funeral away from extinction, its knowledge concentrated in a few aging musicians. That warning still holds, but it has been complicated by a small number of younger players who have taken up the fife and the drums with unexpected seriousness.

Whether a tradition this specific can survive outside the families that carried it remains an open question. For now, the picnics continue, and on the right summer night the hills still pulse with a rhythm older than the state itself.