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Roomie and I were passively listening to American Routes this evening while working on a puzzle. I will do anything to avoid working on a Habermas paper. The show was all about duets. Then the host mentioned that John Cephas and Phil Wiggins were in the studio. All four of our ears perked up. Selkye's may have too, but in her case it was the prospect of a baklava crumb or errant puzzle piece that peaked her interest.
Roomie and I lived two doors up from Phil in Takoma Park. I remember the cigar smoke which drifted into our yard. Phil smoked out front of the house, above the sidewalk, his mastiff Shorty by his side. Shorty was a good dog: friendly, but large, with an oversize (though probably not for the breed) head. We heard Cephas and Wiggins play once on Prairie Home Companion. Actually, we heard Garrison Keillor thank Cephas and Wiggins for appearing on the show. Phil and Judy couldn't make it to our Holiday Eggnog Fest one year, but they left a gift basket with a bottle of wine and a Cephas and Wiggins CD. It was pretty good.
As the septugenarian Cephas tells it, there are two traditional African American forms of the blues—Mississippi Delta and Piedmont—because Africans from different parts of Africa had different musical traditions. Cephas and Wiggins play the more uncommon of the two, the latter.
It was interesting to hear them on the radio, and it made us miss DC's cultural diversity a little.
Posted by Underblog at December 11, 2004 9:28 PM