DC duo kept the Piedmont blues torch aflame from the 1970s into the 21st Century.
Cephas & Wiggins were an acoustic blues duo, composed of the guitarist John Cephas (b. September 4, 1930, d. March 4, 2009) and the harmonica player Phil Wiggins (b. May 8, 1954). They were known for playing Piedmont blues.
Both musicians were born in Washington D.C. Cephas, who was 24 years older than Wiggins, grew up in Bowling Green, Virginia. They first met at a jam session at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife in 1976 and played together in Wilbert "Big Chief" Ellis's band. When Ellis died, they decided to continue as a duo. In 1980, Cephas & Wiggins were recorded by the German archivists Siegfried Christmann and Axel Kustner. These recordings, their first as a duo, were released the following year as a part of the Living Country Blues USA series on the German label L+R. They also appeared around Washington, D.C., with the Travelling Blues Workshop, which included John Jackson, Archie Edwards, Flora Molton, and Mother Scott. Their first U.S. release, the album Dog Days of August, was issued by Flying Fish Records in 1986. Two more albums followed from Flying Fish. After they left the label, they released one album for the New York–based Chesky Records and four albums for Alligator Records. They released the album Richmond Blues on Folkways Records in 2008. Until the late 1980s, Cephas made his primary living from carpentry, playing music on the side. In the 1990s, he became a professional musician, sometimes earning money by teaching classes and workshops. As a duo, they toured extensively, primarily courtesy of the sponsorship of the United States Department of State. They performed together across the USA, as well as in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and the Soviet Union. Cephas was a recipient of a 1989 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. In 2017, Wiggins received a National Heritage Fellowship as well.
Cephas died of natural causes (pulmonary fibrosis) on March 4, 2009. He was 78. He is buried at Quantico National Cemetery in Virginia.
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By Barry Lee Pearson
The duo of acoustic guitarist John Cephas and harpist Phil Wiggins enjoyed a partnership spanning several decades, during which time they emerged among contemporary music's most visible exponents of the Piedmont blues tradition. Both were born in Washington, D.C., although Wiggins was a quarter century younger than his partner; they met at a jam session in 1977, and both performed as regular members of Wilbert "Big Chief" Ellis' Barrelhouse Rockers for a time prior to Ellis' death. Their music, rooted in the rural African-American dance music of Virginia and North Carolina, showed the influence of Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry, with a broad repertoire consisting of Piedmont blues standards as well as an eclectic sampling of Delta stylings, R&B, ballads, ragtime, gospel, and country & western; onward from their 1984 debut, Sweet Bitter Blues, Cephas & Wiggins' sound applied sophisticated traditional instrumentation and modern gospel-edged vocals to both traditional standards and their own hard-hitting compositions, offering a soulful acoustic option to electric blues. A popular festival act, they also issued LPs including 1986's W.C. Handy Award-winning Dog Days of August, 1988's Walking Blues, 1992's Flip, Flop and Fly, and 1996's Cool Down. They kept going strong and in 1999 released their ninth album, Homemade, on the legendary Alligator label. In 2000, Bullseye Blues issued From Richmond to Atlanta, a compilation of tracks from Cephas & Wiggins' three Flying Fish albums recorded between 1984 and 1992. The duo continued to tour and play festivals, helping to keep the Piedmont sound alive. In the summer of 2002, they released Somebody Told the Truth, a mixture of old and new tracks that reintroduced them to the next generation of blues fans. Shoulder to Shoulder appeared in 2006 from Alligator Records. Richmond Blues followed in 2008 from Smithsonian Folkways.