Below are recent excerpts from…..

—– Washington Post

—– New York Times

—– National Endowment for the Arts

[National Endowment for the Arts, May 9, 2024]

“It is with great sadness that the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledges the passing of acoustic blues harmonica player Phil Wiggins, recipient of a 2017 NEA National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.”

“By the time he graduated from high school in 1973, Washington, DC blues elders John Jackson, John Cephas (1989 NEA National Heritage Fellow), and Archie Edwards had embraced him.”

“With Cephas as guitarist and primary singer, the duo performed together for 32 years as internationally renowned stars of the country blues, and a staple on blues radio, ever present on the concert and festival circuit. Cephas & Wiggins played Carnegie Hall, Royal Prince Albert Hall in London, and the Sydney Opera House, as well as small venues worldwide, touring every continent except Antarctica. They recorded more than a dozen critically acclaimed albums, on noted labels such as Flying Fish and Alligator Records, winning the prestigious W.C. Handy Blues Award in 1984 for Best Traditional Album of the Year and in 1987 as Entertainers of the Year. They even performed at the White House with B.B. King.”

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[Washington Post, May 14, 2024]

“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.”

“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.”

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[New York Times, May 18, 2024]

“Phil Wiggins, a harmonica player of such range that he could make his instrument sound like a clarinet one minute, an accordion the next and then an entire percussion section — all in the service of the complex melodies and steady rhythms of the style known as the Piedmont blues — died on May 7 at his home in Takoma Park, Md. He was 69.”

“For much of his career, Mr. Wiggins was best known as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins, in which he performed and recorded with the guitarist and singer John Cephas. The two were considered one of the country’s top Piedmont blues acts, and they toured regularly at home and abroad for over 30 years, until Mr. Cephas’s death in 2009.”

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