Acoustic guitarist John Cephas formed a long-running partnership with harpist Phil Wiggins that positioned the pair among today’s leading interpreters of the Piedmont blues tradition. Although both musicians entered the world in Washington, D.C., Wiggins was twenty-five years Cephas’s junior; the two first crossed paths at a 1977 jam session and later served as core members of Wilbert “Big Chief” Ellis’s Barrelhouse Rockers until Ellis passed away. Their approach drew directly from the rural African-American dance music of Virginia and North Carolina, absorbing the styles of Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry while encompassing Piedmont standards alongside Delta blues, R&B, ballads, ragtime, gospel, and country & western. Beginning with the 1984 release Sweet Bitter Blues, Cephas & Wiggins combined refined traditional instrumentation and contemporary gospel-inflected vocals on both classic material and their own incisive originals, supplying a resonant acoustic counterpart to prevailing electric blues. As a frequent attraction at festivals, the duo issued additional albums that included the 1986 W.C. Handy Award recipient Dog Days of August, 1988’s Walking Blues, 1992’s Flip, Flop and Fly, and 1996’s Cool Down. They maintained momentum with the 1999 appearance of their ninth record, Homemade, on the Alligator imprint. In 2000 Bullseye Blues assembled From Richmond to Atlanta, a retrospective drawn from the three Flying Fish albums the pair recorded between 1984 and 1992. Continued touring and festival appearances helped sustain the Piedmont style; during summer 2002 they returned with Somebody Told the Truth, an assortment of archival and fresh tracks that introduced their work to a new audience of blues listeners. Shoulder to Shoulder followed on Alligator Records in 2006, and Richmond Blues appeared on Smithsonian Folkways in 2008.
