Obit: Rory Miggins, Houston blues advocate

Subject: Obit: Rory Miggins, Houston blues advocate
From: Scoville
Date: 11 Dec 07 - 09:08 AM

RIP: Rory Miggins, Houston blues, zydeco, and country music advocate.

Okay, so nobody else here knows who he was. It's still too bad when one of them dies, especially this young.

Subject: RE: Obit: Rory Miggins, Houston blues advocate
From: Wesley S
Date: 11 Dec 07 - 11:23 AM

In my book the blues will never have enough advocates - so yes he will be missed.

Subject: RE: Obit: Rory Miggins, Houston blues advocate
From: Tweed
Date: 12 Dec 07 - 06:31 AM

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…