After Tony! Toni! Tone! released its first single, “Little Walter,” in 1988, D’Wayne Wiggins was working on his Mustang in front of his Oakland home. He had no idea the song was all over the radio, en route to hitting No. 1 on the R&B charts. An unknown man pulled up in a car and began gawking at Wiggins. The singer and guitarist, in his late 20s, was just about to spit out a “what you looking at?” when the man asked if that was his song on the radio and said, kindly, “I like your music.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, shoot, you’ve got to change,’ ” Wiggins, now 57, recalls by phone from his 1966 drop-top Cadillac DeVille in Oakland.

The Tonys, a family band starring Wiggins, his brother Raphael Wiggins (who would later change his last name to Saadiq, quit the band and become a solo star) and their cousin Timothy Christian Riley, had been preparing for musical success all their lives. Their father, Charlie, had been a Bay Area blues guitarist and the family grew up with instruments and amps scattered throughout the house. D’Wayne had played for years in bands such as Alpha Omega (“We thought we were Earth, Wind & Fire,” he says) before convening the Tonys at his house.

Still, when “Little Walter” became the trio’s first of many hits, including 1990’s “Feels Good,” “Whatever You Want” and “The Blues,” it took the family by surprise. “It changed our lives,” Wiggins says.

Although steeped in blues, funk, gospel and soul from the beginning, the Tonys also absorbed hip-hop and the bouncy, synth-heavy R&B production style of the time known as new jack swing. (A remix of the band’s hit “Baby Doll” by Blackstreet frontman and pioneering producer Teddy Riley helped push them further in that direction.)

“We stay open-minded,” says D’Wayne Wiggins, whose version of Tony! Toni! Tone! today includes Riley and singer Amar Khalil (in the Saadiq frontman slot for 20 years). “A lot of writers and very seasoned musicians stay stuck in their zone and don’t want to branch out and don’t want to accept when it’s new. I like pulling it into the fold.”

Growing up in Oakland, Wiggins lived in a house with seven brothers and sisters in addition to his half brother Raphael.

D’Wayne’s band at the time didn’t like to play shows as much as he did; meanwhile, Riley and Raphael were in a different group, and both turned out to be multitalented musicians. “This was the first time I learned Ray (Raphael’s family nickname) was very skilled at playing bass and singing at the same time,” Wiggins says.

Raphael Saadiq, the younger Wiggins, drifted away from the Tonys in the late ’90s.

The brothers occasionally connect in the studio — early last year, Wiggins told an interviewer they’d recently recorded two new songs. “Every now and then, Ray comes to the table and says he’s thinking about it, and I’m like, ‘I’m ready, I’m always ready,’ and for some reason it doesn’t happen,” he says.