By Dr. Barry Lee Pearson 1999
PHIL WIGGINS
I’ve been into music ever since I can remember. My mother and my father collected piano music. Fats Waller and Earl “Fatha” Hines, Meade Lux Lewis, and all that kind of stuff. That’s one of my memories, just sitting around on the floor of my mother’s room and listening to these records. When the mood hit we’d all get together and not really eat popcorn, but it seemed like that. Just gathering around and being real relaxed and just enjoying listening to the records. Sit around and listen to them and look at the jackets. I can still picture this Meade Lux Lewis jacket where he’s sitting at a blue piano and he’s got a blue suit and a blue derby.
When I got into harmonica, it was just something I wanted to play. I wanted to get involved in it and it just happened. I have to say that one of the main things, when I first picked up the harmonica when I was a kid, the cost of it was a big factor. Because, you know, it was an instrument I could afford on my paper route money. But I always liked the saxophone and the harmonica. I think they have a similar kind of sound and range. I always liked the way the harmonica could be so expressive. You know you can shape sound almost like your voice. It’s so directly hooked to your feelings and your emotions.
When I first started playing harmonica, the only harp player that I’d really heard of was Sonny Terry. And I listened to a little of his stuff. My mother had a couple of Sonny Terry albums. A couple years later I heard of Little Walter and he really influenced me. Then later on Sonny Boy Williamson. Mainly, you know, I just drew from people that I’d jam with on a person-to-person basis. I learned as much from guitar players and piano, you know, even more than other harp players. My first person-to-person influence was Flora Molton. She was a street singer here, and I’d been seeing her all my life. Then when I was a freshman in high school, I went out to her house one day with a friend of mine and started jamming with her and then playing on a more regular basis. She sang only gospel and spirituals. I like gospel and listen to it all I can, you know. Blues and gospel, one influences the other.
A lot of people ask me how I got into it and I think how it really got into my blood was when I used to spend a lot of summers with my grandmother down in my parents’ hometown, Trussville, Alabama, outside of Birmingham, and hear my grandmother’s church. The church yard is right in her back yard. And when I was younger I used to walk her just right around the corner on Thursday or Friday nights when they would have prayer meetings. I would stand outside the church and listen while the elder women of the church were holding the prayer meetings. And they would do what they call lining hymns, where one person, and that’s usually my grandmother, would lead them. She would sing a verse and the women in the congregation would answer back sort of like a chorus. And that was one of the most emotional and really one of the most powerful and bluesy sounds I ever heard.
I think they both use the call-and-response thing, blues and religious music. And I think it affects the melody. Singing the blues is just like speaking, the way it’s phrased and stuff, and I think that’s also true in gospel music, at least the way my grandmother sang it. It was like it wasn’t really nailed down in a musical sense. It was more the way she would speak it. That’s what dictated how she sang it that way, you know, what it was about and how she sang it.
I played with Flora at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1976, and then I got to meet some of the people who had influenced me off records like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Johnny Shines. I got tight with Johnny Shines, and he introduced me to Chief Ellis and that’s where I first met John [Cephas]. We played all kinds of blues and other kinds of music too, country, ragtime, you name it. I’ve worked with electric bands and can play a more Chicago style, but really we like to stick more to our acoustic sound. It’s more of our own local tradition.
When I first heard this music I didn’t think of it as traditional music. I just thought of it as good music. A lot of popular music now has become real high-tech and it’s been that way for a while, and I think that a lot of those gimmicks are played out. I think hat now people are reaching back for a more natural sound because in a way it’s kind of a new thing to the kids. I think too that a lot of young PEOPLE, specifically in the black community, are trying to get reconnected with their history and what their roots were. I notice that in some of the current hip-hop bands that they’re making reference to blues. So that’s one reason why people are looking back to the original stuff. A lot of people talk about it like it’s in the past, but we still get together and play at parties and people will still dance to the stuff we play. There’s a lot of harp players around her and we get together and trade licks and learn from each other, compete a little and try to cut each other. Those parties and contests, I think that kind of environment caused the music to develop in such a way that it’s strong enough to survive so that people can still hear it and pick up on it and enjoy it. And the thing I really like is when we play at parties, like when Aunt Lillian had a birthday, and people are really partying and dancing to the music. That’s what I really like more than sitting in a club where people are sitting down listening to it. People forget that a lot of the tunes we do are dance tunes, party tunes.
It’s real powerful music because of where it came from and what its use was. It came from the black community and was born during hard times like for parties, for good times, and it’s good dance music. I mean blues is nourishment for the human spirit. The blues is good for you because at the time it was created, the human spirit was under attack. And so it was really needed. And it’s still there. I just think that people need to hear it.