He got a real nice Obit over there.

Another day, another terrible blow to the Houston music community.
We just received word that Rory Miggins, the long-time owner of East End bar Local Charm and grand man about town, has passed away at 50 of melanoma.

The Irish (and northern English and Scots too) have a word for what followed in Rory Miggins's wake: crack. No, it's not the crack we know and abhor over here; over there, the crack means something like "good times fueled by wine, women and song," and that was Rory Miggins.

I have known of Rory, if not known him in the flesh, for as long as I can remember. The Taylors, my mother's family, and the Migginses have been intertwined since the 1970s through school and church affiliations and many a St. Patrick's day celebration with the Ancient Order of Hibernians around the Dick Dowling statue in Herrmann Park. My aunts and Rory's younger siblings (there are about a dozen of them) were very close; we were practically cousins.

For years, I would hear legends of Rory, the black sheep of the Miggins family who owned a bar "over by the Ship Channel," as my grandmother would say in scandalized tones. I imagined him to be about 6' 5" and covered with tattoos, his scarred knuckles often brandishing a club or pistol, a sort of Irish version of Randall "Tex" Cobb or Houston's answer to Gerry Cooney.

He sounded like my kind of guy, for sure. And he didn't disappoint when I finally got to meet him about ten years ago. No, he didn't look like an Irish Bandido, but he fully lived up to the image I had conceived of him.

Wherever the best times and music were at any given moment, you were fairly sure to bump into Rory, right up to the end. Just a few weeks ago, a visibly ailing Rory was spotted at the Mavis Staples / Charlie Musselwhite / North Mississippi All-Stars show at Miller Outdoor Theater.

Here's hoping the tunes are sweet, the crawfish perfectly spiced and boiled, and the beer good and cold where he's bound…