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Blues Player Leaves a Legacy
By Mike Osegueda
The Fresno Bee
Published Saturday, May 24, 2003, 4:35 AM
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Harmonica Slim always had a story to tell.
Even with death at his door, he couldn't leave without one more.
He left a story of what happens to an old bluesman when he sings his last song.
Harmonica Slim was what he was known as in the blues world. Slim is what some friends called him. Richard Riley Riggins was the name his mama gave him.
He died May 4 after a heart attack. He was 82. Services will be held at 2 p.m. today at Saint Rest Baptist Church, 1550 E. Florence Ave., Fresno.
What happened after his death is just as mysterious as Mr. Riggins' life.
The day after he died, many on the local blues scene were mulling the loss. The problem was Mr. Riggins' wife had died three years before, and no one knew of any other family in the area, except a possible cousin -- which is a story in itself.
So while blues people close to Mr. Riggins pondered what to do, his body lay at University Medical Center for almost three weeks.
A few years back, with his health declining, Mr. Riggins had used an electric wheelchair.
His caregiver, Ramona Davis, located Mr. Riggins' daughter, Mattie Hill, 60, a resident of Mount Clemens, Mich., about two weeks after his death. He had three children, from three women, living in three different parts of the country.
Hill was the only one still alive. Though she had infrequent contact with her father over the years, she packed up her things and came to Fresno with her daughters.
When Hill arrived in Fresno, she said she found Mr. Riggins' apartment had been forced open. His television was missing, a $1,100 oxygen machine was gone and a lot of his important paperwork, like his recording contracts, had disappeared.
Hill filed a police report.
That left her with the task of arranging a funeral in a town she had visited only a few times.
She turned to Chester Riggins, pastor at Saint Rest Baptist. He and Mr. Riggins had called each other "cousin," but neither knew for sure whether they were related. The two met some years back, saw they had the same last name and called themselves cousins.
"This has just been a total mess," Hill says. "Trying to do all these things, and I feel so bad about all this because it took so long for me to find out."
But the mess fits Mr. Riggins' pattern of unbelievable stories about his life that friends and acquaintances recall.
There's one about how he found his first harmonica when he was 9. It was in a mudhole back in Mississippi, like it was left right there for him. He took it home to his mother. She boiled it clean, and he began playing.
Another favorite is how he knew a young Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Miss., and once, when The King was misbehaving, he got a spanking, courtesy of Mr. Riggins.
Then there's the story about how he once played in a gospel group with Sam Cooke and Ray Charles.
"That whole storytelling is really a part of the blues," says Chris Millar, a longtime friend, who works for Fedora Records and signed Mr. Riggins to the label. "You can kind of reinvent yourself in that music, create a new sort of persona, and Slim was the epitome of that. Even though he may have stretched the truth a little bit, it was a great story and it had meaning."
"I always thought he was one of the most original and unique blues performers," says Tom Mazzolini, producer of the San Francisco Blues Festival, where Harmonica Slim played a number of times. "He was the old school. He was the real thing. There's not a lot of that around anymore."
Mazzolini met Mr. Riggins in the 1970s, when the latter had lived in Oakland and played blues with K.C. Douglas. Mr. Riggins had come to California from Mississippi in the 1940s and stumbled between the Bay Area and the central San Joaquin Valley ever since.
What many people remember, besides his stories, is his outgoing personality. In trips to Europe to perform, Millar says, Mr. Riggins would entertain entire airplanes full of people.
"My kids love him. They think he's the funniest man alive," says Hill, Mr. Riggins' daughter, before a long pause. "Or that was alive.
"I hate that I didn't get a chance to spend time with him. He was a pretty good guy in his own way and right. He did the best he could with what he had."
Mr. Riggins never knew how to read or write. But in recent years, he had tried to learn.
"He couldn't read a menu," Millar says. "But he knew what he wanted to eat."
At 82, even though he was in a wheelchair, he still would perform. Millar had future performances scheduled for Mr. Riggins when he died.
To his friends, family and acquaintances, it just goes to show that Mr. Riggins was a true bluesman. It was all he knew. The only way to stop that was death.
He used to have a saying with which he would close every show, another Harmonica Slim trademark.
"Like a windup rooster with a curly comb, spreading his wings and gettin' it on, Harmonica Slim is moving on."
Indeed he is.
The reporter can be reached at mosegueda@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6479.
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