John Cephas (1930- ) and Phil Wiggins (1954- )

"Lord I'm blue as indigo, my baby she just left town/She left with the preacher man, Oh glory, they cannot be found." - Cephas && Wiggins, "Sweet Bitter Blues"

John Cephas and Phil Wiggins are a contemporary Piedmont blues duo who have been called a latter-day Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. However, they are very much unique artists in their own right, creating their own unique mix of Piedmont blues, gospel, Delta blues, R&B, folk ballads, and their own compositions. The only traditional artists to win the W.C. Handy award for Blues Entertainer of the Year, John Cephas and Phil Wiggins have taken their music to the world, always finding an audience receptive to their music.

John Cephas' Life
John Cephas was born in Washington, D.C., in 1930 to Ernest and Sylvia Cephas. He grew up in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington, near George Washington University. At the time it was supposed to be a bad area of town (it has since come under the gruesome influence of gentrification), but John has described it as a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody, a place with a sense of community and the real feel of a neighborhood. John's first experience singing in public was as a duo with his brother Ernest, Jr. in church. Under the guidance of their mother, the two sang before the congregation regularly. However, the blues was as important part of John's early background as well. His Aunt Lillian taught him his first blues chords on a guitar; John also learned a few things from her boyfriend Haley Dorsey, who played at local house parties and juke joints. When John was young, his father bought a guitar to learn how to play blues. (Apparently the elder Mr. Cephas was one Baptist minister who was able to make the distinction between the blues and the environment where it was heard.) Though young John was not permitted to play his father's guitar, he kept playing and practicing on the sneak.

However, Cephas' biggest influence, musical and otherwise, was his grandfather. John Dudley lived in Caroline County, Virginia, near the town of Bowling Green. While spending time with his grandfather on weekends and vacations, John learned about those venerable institutions, the house party and the fish fry. Here John learned about music, drinking, and (in Cephas' words) what it meant to be a man. Dudley also showed him places that were important to the family history. This developed the sense of roots and history that John still has today.

John was never an overly attentive student (at least in the classroom), but that changed when he entered high school. He's described himself as a hands-on kind of person, which is why the shop classes were much more appealing to him. At the time, John was also singing in a gospel group and singing with his friends in a street-corner vocal group. Then on weekends and during the summer, he was in Caroline County, playing and singing blues at house parties and fish fries. This was also where he started to develop his appreciation for alcohol, particularly corn liquor. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, John held several jobs, including one with PEPCO, the electric company in DC. On weekends, he began to work as a fisherman in Lewes, Delaware. Eventually he did this full time, becoming first mate for several captains, including Slim Rudolph, the only black captain in Lewes at the time. John spent most of his offhours at a little joint, but not as a performer; he had quit playng guitar by this time. As John put it, "That was the days when mainly I was plying my trade as being an alcoholic." Alcohol soon took over his life. John, who's described his mid-60s self as "a wino", was found by his mother and dried out. A friend told him about an opening for a carpenter at the Army National Guard in DC, a job he held until his retirement.

John had given up guitar altogether by the late sixties, being frustrated and disgusted with the music scene. Then one night he went to a birthday party and was introduced to piano player Big Chief Ellis. They played a bit and sounded good; Chief had recorded with many Piedmont blues guitarists in the fifties, so Cephas fit right in with Ellis' style. Ellis asked John to play a couple gigs with him. John said thanks-but-no-thanks, but Chief kept calling up the reluctant Cephas to play a few gigs with him. John eventually gave in and the duo started playing at festivals and universities, primarily on the East Coast. John played on a few tunes for Chief's album on Trix and made a few (unreleased) recordings of his own for the label. In 1976, they were playing with Johnny Shines at the American Folklife Festival on The Mall in Washington, DC, when they heard a young harmonica player named Phil Wiggins, who was playing with Flora Molton......

Phil Wiggins' Life
A quiet, private man, Phil Wiggins was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Though growing up a city kid in a (more or less) northern place, Phil was thoroughly exposed to Southern African-American music. At the family's home in the District, his father played a little piano, and his mother played records by blues artists like Sleepy John Estes, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, and boogie-woogie piano players like Meade Lux Lewis. He also spent time with his father's family in Alabama. (Phil's father grew up with Big Chief Ellis back in Titusville, Alabama. Small world, indeed.) While there, he would go to prayer meetings with the family, listening to his grandmother leading the call-and-response prayer songs. So at an early age, Phil was exposed to great Southern music, sacred and secular. His first harmonica was a plastic toy, but he soon borrowed (Phil himself used the word ``swiped") his step-sister's fancier harp. One day during his freshman year of high school, he and a friend went to the house of Flora Molton and started paying with her regularly. A street singer who played spirituals, Molton's music was primarily rhythmic, and Phil developed a style that fit in on top of/behind her riffing. Playing with Flora, Phil started making a name for himself. He played with local bluesman/songster legend John Jackson and touring bluesmen like Hound Dog Taylor and Eddie Shaw. Wiggins had met quite a few musicians by the time he and Flora played at the Smithsonian Folklife Festivals in D.C. By this time, the young harmonica wiz was a seasoned professional. He was also more interested in playing blues, as much as he liked playing spirituals with Flora. While at the festival, he got fairly close to Johnny Shines. The older delta bluesman promised to get in touch with him and jam. The day he did in 1976, Shines called Phil up on stage to play with himself, Big Chief Ellis, John Cephas, and a bass player named James Bellamy.......

Teaming Up
After their jam session, Phil joined John, Chief, and James in The Barrelhouse Rockers. They played at colleges, festivals, and clubs up and down the east coast for the better part of two years. Chief left for Alabama in 1977 shortly before he died, having grown weary of living in D.C., especially the crime. (The more things change, ...) John had gained a reputation through playing with Chief and got offered a few jobs. He wasn't entirely comfortable as a solo act, so he asked Phil to accompany him on a couple gigs. They seemed to make a good fit, and another great blues duo was born.

John and Phil played at various clubs and festivals in the East, their reputation slowly spreading through American blues and folk circles. They eventually came to the attention of Axel Küstner, who arranged for them to tour Europe in 1981 and 1982 for the American Folk Blues Festival. They also recorded their first album, Bowling Green John Cephas and Harmonica Phil Wiggins from Virginia, U.S.A., Living Country Blues Volume 1, for Lippman and Rau's L+R label in 1981. By this time they had come to the attention of Joe Wilson of the Arts America Program of the United States Information Agency. The two began playing overseas regularly on behalf of the agency; their first tour in 1982 took them to Africa, "from Madagascar to Mauritius". The next year saw the release of Sweet Bitter Blues, their second L+R album. In 1984 they recorded a mix of covers, traditional songs, and their own compositions for their first domestic release. Titled Let It Roll on Marimac Records, much of it was later picked up by the Flying Fish label and released as Dog Days of August. The album was a critical success and increased John and Phil's domestic reputation, which was lagging woefully behind their international popularity. In 1986, they were invited to the Handy Awards, where they won Traditional Artists of the Year, which they had partly expected, and the coveted Blues Entertainers of the Year Award, which they certainly did not. This was quite a surprise; not that John and Phil weren't that good or didn't deserve it, but the award had never before gone to any artist playing in a traditional style. Their reputations solidified and their fame having increased (at least in the blues world), they began touring more or less full time. John retired from his carpentry job and Phil more or less quit his job counselling schoolkids and teaching harmonica to the inmates at Lorton. (Phil is still active in community service, though, when the touring schedule allows it.)

Now a more-or-less full-time blues duo, Cephas and Wiggins recorded more cassettes for Marimac and, in 1989, Flying Fish released Guitar Man. The album was true to form: a few covers, a few traditional songs, a few of their own compositions. In 1992, Flying Fish released Flip, Flop, and Fly, quite a departure. Flip, Flop, and Fly was more R&B-oriented and less "traditional" than their former releases; Daryl Davis' piano was a nice addition, especially on the title track. And even when covering a Piedmont musician like Rev. Gary Davis, they brought in Miller's Brass Band from DC to help them out on Banks of the River. The Piedmont blues was still at the heart of their music, though. Most importantly, John and Phil had come into their own as songwriters by this time. John's Delta-esque Backbiter and Phil's subtle Evil Twin Blues stand with any song they've recorded, cover or original. In addition, they began to branch out as entertainers. Phil appeared in the prize-winning film Matewon and John garnered raves in 1992 for his protrayal of a blind bluesman in the Kennedy Center's Blind Man Blues.

Bluesmen, released by Chesky in 1993, found them returning to the format of their earlier releases, but with Cool Down from 1995 they were once again exploring their musical boundaries and (lest this be overlooked) made one hell of a record. Though the music was in some ways the same mix of originals, covers, and traditional songs, it stands apart from their other releases. For one thing, many of the songs feature additional performers on bass, piano, even clarinet. They had covered Skip James' Special Rider before, but this time they played with Djimo Kouyate, a kora player from Senegal. The song, haunting and intense to start with, is made more so with Kouyate's presence. Their covers also take on more breadth: from Bessie Smith to Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell's Corn Liquor Blues (called Hard Liquor here) to Fats Domino to country artist Merle Travis (albeit a song that came from black coal miners in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the 1880s; so much for this ``new" idea ofmulticulturalism). Their own songs are also fantastic. I've driven through John's home county in Virginia on Highway 301 in the early morning, and the instrumental Caroline in the Morning really captures the mood well. Phil wrote the strongest songs on the disc: No Ice in My Bourbon and the title track, a modern acoustic blues about inner city violence and kids killing kids. More than one critic has said that after 1945, the Piedmont blues never moved north and modernized in the Northeast like the Delta blues did in Chicago or Texas blues did on the West Coast. A debatable point, but it now looks like it did; it just may have taken a while to do it. John and Phil continue to perform on and off this continent, and they are well worth the price of admission. See them if you get a chance.

Their Music
John and Phil have been likened to a latter-day Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, for obvious reasons. They play acoustic, Piedmont blues on guitar and harmonica to mostly white audiences, largely folk festival settings; on record, they play some R&B; and they've travelled the world to become the best-known Piedmont bluesmen of their day. End of story, right?

Well, no, of course not. Granted, Piedmont blues is at the heart of John and Phil's music. You can hear it in their most "modern" and "up-to-date" songs like Cool Down and Man without a Future. (And as John said, "any song that mentions the psychic hotline is an up-to-date song.") Most of their covers are of Piedmont artists like Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, and Rev. Gary Davis. And like many Piedmont artists, a significant part of their repertoire consists of songs that predate blues: Careless Love, John Henry, St. James Infirmary, and so on. However, their influences are broader than that. In addition, John and Phil are both of generations where African-Americans listened to the blues less and less. This may make them a little unusual, though it doesn't make their music any better or worse in and of itself.

Phil, for his part, has said "I just like good music". (One can well imagine that he's probably sick of people asking him why he plays the blues ... as if there were some unwritten rule that black bluesmen had to be born before a particular date.) He lists Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), and Sonny Terry as his influences on harp. He is quick to point out, though, that he has learned at least as much, if not more, from guitarists and pianists. In fact, he has claimed Flora Molton, Johnny Shines, and Big Chief Ellis as major influences on his music as well as his career. Phil first played behind Flora Molton; her music was almost totally rhythmic, so he was given a lot of musical room to fill. This gave him the opportunity to develop into quite the harmonica player, and some of his solos are breathtaking. Though Phil can play in the cram-as-many-notes-per-beat style that some harmonica players get caught up in, he doesn't let his virtuosity get in the way of the music. Even as early as Sweet Bitter Blues, Wiggins showed remarkable restraint and maturity.

John's major influence is probably Rev. Gary Davis, and it's certainly an interesting one. Davis was a street preacher who could and did play some fantastic blues and did some things that didn't exactly line up with Christian philosophy. John is the son of a preacher who plays "devil's music" in a world where the music is now enjoyed as much for the music as anything else. (Admittedly, there are blues fans who need more reasons than the music to enjoy the music, but that's their problem.) Apparently John hasn't had too much problem with playing "devil's music", since his father, a man of the cloth, enjoyed it as well. John also enjoys country music, at least real country music and not that pretty-boy crap that you see on TNN. While one stage one day in the Caribbean, John suddenly added Today I Started Loving You Again to the show, surprising Phil and Barry Lee Pearson. (The song showed up later on Flip, Flop, and Fly.) John is also a huge Skip James fan and is by far the best interpreter of James' material other than James himself. Except for Jack Owens, no one else can come close to capturing James' haunting (not to say haunted) vocals and guitar style, let alone successfully incorporate a harmonica and kora into the mix.

[A side note: in his book I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, Stephen Calt tends to dismiss Cephas as a relative lightweight in the blues. However, Calt may have three unconscious prejudices against him. First, John was born the year before James made his Paramount recordings, so Calt may not consider Cephas old enough, by whatever reasoning, to be a ``real" bluesman. This prejudice would certainly not be unique to Calt, and I admit guilt at this from time to time. Secondly, John plays primarily in the Piedmont style, which many still, to this day, quickly dismiss as lightweight and ``less black" than blues from the Delta. This is, in academic terms, a load of crap, since the Piedmont style is the blues genre closest to the music's roots and bears a striking resemblence to the music of the Wolof and other West African cultures. And lastly, the more unique Calt made Skip James seem, the better his book might sell. This is not meant to be an attack on Calt; I'd Rather Be... is a great book, and he is to be commended for it. If any of these charges are true, I don't think that they were conscious decisions. Calt would probably be the first to admit that he, like you, me, or anyone else, carries around preconceptions. After all, we are entitled to our own opinions, which is why I gave mine.]

However, it is still the Piedmont blues that forms the core of John and Phil's style and repertoire. (I've discussed this music at length on the above-linked web pages and will try to repeat myself as little as possible.) Whenever someone says "Piedmont blues", most blues fans think "Ah, like Blind Boy Fuller", if they think at all. In general, this is a fair enough thought, but John and Phil's music has much more variety than Fuller's did and the mood is often less playful. In the Living Blues review of Cool Down (LB #127, p76), Jim DeKoster compares Cephas' voice to Alec Seward, who was also from Virginia's tidewater region (Norfolk). However, John's vocals also compare with those Virginia artists who lived away from the Chesapeake's inlets ... again, not surprising, since Caroline County is on the edge of the tidewater region and is/was less isolated than much of the area near the Chesapeake. In the late seventies, John met songster/bluesman Frank Hovington at the latter's home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. According to Cephas, they started to play together and, though they'd just met, it was as if they'd been playing together their whole lives. It just shows that, even in the details, Cephas and Wiggins' music is deeper and more complex than one would think at first glance.

Recommended Listening
As of this writing, there are six Cephas and Wiggins cds on the market that I know of. The Living Country Blues Volume 1 release on L+R is unavailable the last time I checked. Evidence seems to be releasing some of that label's catalog (including Sweet Bitter Blues), so it may be available again in the future. And before I can recommend one of the cds, you must decide if you want to hear their "traditional" releases or one of the more "modern" discs. And please keep in mind that, while I may prefer one release over another, I enjoy them all and would buy each of them again.

Among their traditional releases, I prefer Sweet Bitter Blues on Evidence (ECD 26050-2), mainly because of the title track (with lyrics by a "blues griot", the late Otis Williams) and the seven bonus tracks which were recorded live in Europe. They repeat two songs in the live recordings, but the versions are different enough that this isn't annoying. Bluesmen on Chesky Records (JD89) is another fine disc, containing a wide variety of acoustic covers, from Jimmy Reed to Mance Lipscomb to W.C. Handy. Dog Days of August (FF70934) and Guitar Man (FF70470), both on Flying Fish, don't offer as much music as the other two releases. They are good enough to win Handy Awards, but at roughly forty minutes each, they give you less bang for your buck.

Of the other two releases, I highly recommend their Alligator effort, Cool Down (ALCD 4838). The covers are excellent (especially Special Rider and Nine Pound Hammer), and the originals are great. Phil really comes into his own as a songwriter, contributing Action Man, No Ice in My Bourbon, The Blues Will Do Your Heart Good, and the title track, which captures the chilling feel of quiet intensity that the subject deserves. John's Man without a Future, written with storyteller Jackie Torrence, is a fine effort, and while Caroline in the Morning may not be classified as a blues song, it does capture the mood of a cool fall morning on the edge of Virginia's tidewater region. Their other release, Flip, Flop, and Fly (FF 70580), contains some good music; the title track flies out of the speakers, and their version of Today I Started Loving You Again is the best I've heard. However, I'd recommend Cool Down first. And as always with my recommended listening suggestions, your mileage may vary.

Bibliography
The following are the written resources I used in creating this page. Those with a are the ones I recommend.

Bastin, Bruce. Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition of the Southeast. The University of Illinois Press, 1986 (ISBN 0-252-06521-2).

Calt, Stephen I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. Da Capo Press, 1994 (ISBN 0-306-80579-0).

Harris, Sheldon. Blues Who's Who. DaCapo Press, 1979 (ISBN 0-306-80155-8).

Herzhaft, Gerard. Encyclopedia of the Blues. The University of Arkansas Press, 1992 (ISBN 1-55728-253-6).

Pearson, Barry Lee. Virginia Piedmont Blues: The Lives and Art of Two Virginia Bluesmen. The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990 (ISBN 0-8122-1300-9).

Pearson, Barry. ``Bowling Green John Cephas and Harmonica Phil Wiggins: D.C. Country Blues,'' Living Blues, January-February 1985.

Santelli, Robert. The Big Book of Blues. Penguin, 1993 (ISBN 0 14 01.5939 8).

Skelly, Richard in All Music Guide to the Blues (Editted by Michael Erlewinel, Vladmir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra, and Cub Koda.) Miller Freeman Books, 1996 (ISBN 0-87930-424-3).

Wilson, Joe. Liner notes to Cool Down, Alligator ALCD 4838.