Phil Wiggins, a blues harmonica virtuoso who embraced the jaunty Piedmont style and toured the world as part of a duo celebrating a distinctive musical form that was revived in clubs and impromptu jams in the Washington area, died May 7 at his home in Takoma Park, Md. He was 69.
Mr. Wiggins died of multiple-organ cancer a day before his 70th birthday, said Frank Matheis, who co-authored a 2020 book, “Sweet Bitter Blues: Washington, DC’s Homemade Blues,” with Mr. Wiggins.
Mr. Wiggins first made his mark on the Washington music scene in the late 1960s as a teenager with a signature sound, influenced by jazz improvisation and gospel’s call-and-response refrains.
He learned how to meld his style into the melodic tempo of Piedmont blues, a Mid-Atlantic musical tradition that borrowed elements of ragtime and country and evolved separately from the better-known Delta blues.
Piedmont’s place in regional music was given a major boost in the 1960s by Washington’s blues community, which featured the genre at venues such as the Alpha Tonsorial Palace with blues impresario Archie Edwards. In 1976, at the Smithsonian National Folklife Festival, Mr. Wiggins met a guitar player who had emerged as a star from the city’s Piedmont blues scene, John Cephas.
Their collaboration would last for more than three decades as the duo Cephas & Wiggins, recording 12 albums and traveling the globe as ambassadors of the Piedmont blues at storied venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Albert Hall in London.
In 1988, on a State Department-backed tour, Mr. Wiggins and Cephas were among the first Americans to perform at Moscow’s annual folk festival during the Soviet era. The next year, they had people dancing in the aisles at the Sydney Opera House.
At a White House event in 1999 hosted by President Bill Clinton, Cephas & Wiggins performed along with B.B. King and others.
“People automatically think of sadness and depression when they think of blues,” Mr. Wiggins said. “But the blues, of course, is uplifting music, music to rejuvenate you, to nourish the spirit. When you get down, the blues will pick you up again.”
In the duo, Mr. Wiggins was the younger stylist, whose Hohner Marine Band harmonica was a warbling and growling counterpoint to Cephas’s baritone vocals. Cephas was the elder blues statesman playing a classic Piedmont style, a thumb-strummed bass line and fingerpicking melody. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded Mr. Wiggins a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts, in 2017. (Cephas received the award in 1989.)
After Cephas’s death in 2009, Mr. Wiggins worked with many D.C.-area musicians, including guitarist Corey Harris, and fronted a blues ensemble called the Chesapeake Sheiks.
Mr. Wiggins also took on a mentor role, even carving out time to offer tips to beginner harp players. He hoped to rekindle some of the creative energy of his boyhood in Northeast D.C. when the Piedmont blues was riding a wave in the city.
“It was the golden age of house parties and jamming and playing for people that were dancing and partying,” he wrote in “Sweet Bitter Blues.”
Jazz and gospel
Phillip Theodore Wiggins was born in Washington on May 8, 1954. His early introduction to music came from his father, who had a prized collection of blues and jazz records. His mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Wiggins said other musical inspiration came during summer visits with his grandmother in Titusville, Ala. On Sundays, he would listen to the soaring peaks and powerful choruses of the gospel choir at her church. “I think that’s where I really started to fall in love with acoustic country blues — even though it wasn’t blues,” he recalled in an oral history with the NEA.
In Washington, he marveled at the street-corner extravaganzas of Flora Molton, a nearly blind gospel-and-blues matriarch who performed “truth songs,” as she called them. (When he was older, Mr. Wiggins jammed with Molton.) “I remember her being on the corner in Washington since I was a little boy able to walk,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2002.
Mr. Wiggins wanted to play in the school band, but his parents could not afford an instrument and lessons. He had some money earned from his route delivering newspapers. For a few dollars, Mr. Wiggins bought his first Hohner harmonica.
“When I picked it up and started trying to figure out how it worked, it felt like the harmonica works the same way as your voice. You have an idea in your mind that you want to express, and it just comes out, the same way speaking happens,” he told Blues Blast Magazine in 2021.
“In a lot of ways, it still feels that intuitive to me,” he added, “except that, for me, the harmonica works better than my voice.”
His style further developed listening to jazz pianists and horn players, studying how they peel off on musical runs and riffs. By the time Mr. Wiggins was in high school, he was sitting in with veteran bluesmen such as singer-guitarist Johnny Shines and pianist Sunnyland Slim.
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Wiggins was part of the Barrelhouse Rockers, a band fronted by pianist Wilbert “Big Chief” Ellis. Cephas then came aboard. Barrelhouse toured until 1977, and then Cephas and Mr. Wiggins set off on their own — following in the guitar-harmonica combo of an earlier influential Piedmont duo, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
“The cool thing about the harmonica is that it can be melodic, and you can use it for call-and-response and rhythm,” Mr. Wiggins once said. “Remember, all this music is basically dance music. I use the harmonica to play the backbeat. It’s fun.”
Cephas & Wiggins recorded two albums for a German label, L&R, “Living Country Blues” (1981) and “Sweet Bitter Blues” (1983). Their first U.S.-made release, “Dog Days of August” (1987), was recorded in Cephas’s living room and won a W.C. Handy Award — often called the Grammys of the blues — for best traditional blues album. Between 1975 and 2007, Cephas & Wiggins won 11 Handy Awards. The last Cephas & Wiggins album, “Richmond Blues,” was released in 2008.
In recent years, Mr. Wiggins spent additional time on his other passion: cooking and, in particular, barbecue. He had been working with his co-author Matheis on a book of recipes and personal stories about food. They got only as far as the third chapter.
“I’ve always felt like, for me, that it’s not so much that you spend a lot of money on food,” said Mr. Wiggins, “but that you spend time preparing it well.”
His marriage to Wendy Chick ended in divorce. Survivors include his partner of more than 30 years, Judy LaPrade; two daughters from his marriage; four brothers; a sister; and two grandsons.
For Mr. Wiggins, the revived interest in Piedmont blues was a way to draw attention to the music’s connections to other traditionally Black art forms such as buck dance, which began among enslaved people and includes a variety of improvisational dance steps.
“Blues was kind of born in the community. It was a relief for the community, a way of expressing themselves,” he said in “Blues Houseparty,” a 1989 documentary. “People still dig dancing to it, partying to it and having a good time because it’s music about life.”
