From the few fragments of his compositions that survive, his musical ability is generally regarded to have been slender.
His most significant work was his music for John Crowne's masque Calisto, or The Chaste Nymph.
He also wrote incidental music for John Dryden's Conquest of Granada and Marriage à la Mode, George Etheridge's The Man of Mode, Nathaniel Lee's Gloriana, and Thomas Shadwell's Epsom Wells.
In Tom Brown's Letters from the Dead to the Living, Staggins is described as "bandy legged and contemptuously regarded".
Following his death he was buried in Woollon on 16 June 1700 at St. George's Chapel, Windsor.