On the keyboards, Richard Halligan. (Image provided by Bob Halligan Jr.)

I always knew that my good friend Bob Halligan Jr. put his blood, sweat and tears into his music.

But not until he sent out a message this morning did I realize that an original member of the group Blood, Sweat & Tears was the Syracuse songwriter and musician’s first cousin.

Richard Halligan is coming to visit Central New York next week. Bob goes with the more affectionate Dick as he describes his cousin’s accomplishment. I’ll stick with the more formal Richard after connecting to his web site and reading about his impressive accomplishments.

Richard Halligan played trombone on the 1968 first album from Blood, Sweat & Tears, joining Al Kooper. For album two, when David Clayton Thomas took as front man from Kooper, Halligan replaced Kooper on Hammond B3 organ as well as adding some piano and flute work to his trombone. Halligan also arranged 60 percent of that album. It won that year’s Grammy for album of the year. One of the albums it beat out: The Beatles’ “Abbey Road.”

He also was nominated for a Grammy in the best instrumental category as the arranger for “Variations on a Theme by Eric Satie.” Halligan played all three flute parts on that album.

Halligan left BS&T in 1972, and went on to compose music for movies and TV.

And, “all the while, played jazz and wrote classical pieces,” says Bob Halligan, the charismatic leader for spirited Celtic rock band Ceili Rain and songwriter who’s seen his songs hit the charts for artists as diverse as Cher, Judas Priest and Kathy Mattea. “All of this from the mild-mannered cousin whom I had known since babyhood,” Bob Halligan says of the son of his father’s brother.

Richard Halligan will be the Soyers Series lecturer, at 6:45 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management’s Room 007. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The next night, he’ll perform his one-man show, at 7 p.m. Oct. 18 at St. Paul’s Cathedral, at E. Fayette and Montgomery streets in downtown Syracuse.

Titled “Love, Sweat & Fears,” the show is a “played/spoken/sung history of his journey,” Bob Halligan says.

Admission is free for college students, $10 for the general public.