Pinetop Perkins life and biography

Joseph William Perkins, known by the stage name Pinetop Perkins, was an American blues musician, specializing in piano music. He played with some of the most influential blues and rock and roll performers in American history, and received numerous honors during his lifetime including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and induction into the Blues Hall of Fame.

The career of blues pianist Pinetop Perkins recapitulates the entire history of the blues, from its origins in Mississippi in the early part of the twentieth century to its modern status as a classic form of American music. Perkins migrated with the blues itself, first to the Memphis, Tennessee, area and then to Chicago, where he performed in the band of blues great Muddy Waters at the height of Waters's fame. After striking out on his own, Perkins drew on a great wave of late-life creativity, becoming not just a living legend of the blues but a force driving the genre forward.

Pinetop Perkins was born Bob Perkins on July 7, 1913, on Honey Creek Plantation near Belzoni, Mississippi, and was later renamed Joe Willie Perkins. Some sources list a July 13 date, but Perkins himself gave July 7 as his birthday in a 2003 St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview. His father was a Baptist minister, his mother a Native American who bought him his first cigarette at age 10. "I came up the hard way," he told the Post-Dispatch. "My grandmother hit me upside the head with a board. Knocked me out. When I came to, she was still hitting me. I left there running."

Growing up in the heart of the Mississippi River delta, Perkins heard the music of guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson and of his two cousins, Elmore James and "Homesick" James. His parents also collected 78 rpm blues and jazz records, and he heard an unrecorded but beautifully named blues piano player named Tubba Sludge. Before long, Perkins was playing and singing in juke joints himself. Also, he told Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times, he played at chicken fights, "where your only pay was the dead chicken." During the day Perkins operated a mule-drawn plow on the Hopson Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, later a blues historic site. He spent several years in St. Louis in the 1930s.

Around 1943, Perkins signed on with guitarist Robert Nighthawk and performed with him on the Helena, Arkansas, radio station KFFA. In the mid-1940s he participated in a practical joke, locking a chorus girl from the High Brown Follies troupe in the bathroom of a bar with a 55-gallon barrel of coal ashes. When the dancer finally escaped, she came out swinging a knife angrily, and Perkins's arm was the first thing the knife made contact with. "She did it to me, man," Perkins told reporter Dave Hoekstra of the Chicago Sun-Times, referring to the giant scar still visible on his arm 50 years later.

The incident damaged tendons in Perkins's arm, putting an end to his guitar career. But after he began concentrating on the piano, he bounced back quickly, joining a group of musicians led by Sonny Boy Williamson, who played on the King Biscuit Hour, a fabled blues radio program on KFFA. Perkins became an adept interpreter of a number called "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie," originally recorded in the 1920s by Clarence "Pinetop" Smith," and he recorded the piece for Memphis's Sun label in 1953. As Perkins became identified with "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie," he acquired the nickname of Pinetop himself.

In 1958 Perkins and his wife, Sarah, moved to Chicago after encouragement from Nighthawk. In the 1960s he played with Nighthawk's student, slide guitarist Earl Hooker, in blues clubs along Maxwell Street, one of the centers of Chicago's blues scene. Money was tight for several years, and Perkins was forced to live with Hooker's mother for a year. But things turned around in 1969, when Perkins got an invitation to join the band of Muddy "Mississippi" Waters, the dean of Chicago's electric blues guitarists. He accepted on the spot.

That job gave Perkins his first real measure of fame. Waters's band toured Europe, and Perkins appeared on Waters's classic later albums, such as Hard Again (1977) and I'm Ready (1978). Perkins recorded an album for a French label in 1976 and contributed tracks to the Alligator label's Living Chicago Blues compilations of the late 1970s. In 1980 Perkins and a group of other Waters sidemen formed the Legendary Blues Band and recorded several albums on the Rounder label. Perkins's singing was featured on those albums, and his characteristic piano style, with right-hand clusters evoking horn blasts, became familiar to blues fans. In 1988 Perkins made his belated United States solo album debut with After Hours, released on the Blind Pig label, with Little Mike and the Tornadoes, a group of young blues players, backing the septuagenarian pianist.

In the mid-1990s Perkins finally seemed to be on the brink of retirement. After the death of his wife in 1996, Perkins fell into depression and began to show the effects of decades of alcohol abuse. Maltreatment from his stepchildren didn't help. "Every time I went on the road they'd take something," he told the Sun-Times. "My clothes. My tools. My guns. ... Anything salable, they got it. Those kids could steal all the sweeting out of a gingersnap---and not break the crust."

When he was well over 80, Perkins embarked on a 12-step program to break his addiction to alcohol. "Changing your life at 84 is quite unthinkable for most people," his friend Steve Tomashefsky told the New York Times. "It shows how intensely Pinetop wants to be out there playing." Perkins moved to La Porte, Indiana, where he was befriended by blues enthusiast and bar owner Buck Levandoski. Recording seven albums between 1995 and 2004, Perkins became a beloved audience favorite at blues clubs and big outdoor festivals. A ten-time winner of the blues world's annual W.C. Handy Award, Perkins picked up a $10,000 National Heritage Fellowship, the United States government's highest traditional arts award, in 2000.

In 2004 Perkins released Ladies Man, an album pairing him with a roster of leading female blues singers such as Ruth Brown, Odetta, Susan Tedeschi, and Angela Strehli. He maintained a busy performing schedule into 2005, showing up in person at the Grammy Awards ceremony to accept a lifetime achievement award; and his Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album at age 91 made him the oldest nominee in the award's history. After he turned 90, the Ottawa Citizen asked him if he ever planned to retire. "Hell, they're still paying me." Perkins answered. "Why would I?"

In 2008, Perkins received a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album for Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live In Dallas together with Henry James Townsend, Robert Lockwood, Jr. and David Honeyboy Edwards. He was also nominated in the same category for his solo album, Pinetop Perkins on the 88's: Live in Chicago.

At the age of 97, he won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album for Joined at the Hip, an album he recorded with Willie "Big Eyes" Smith. Perkins thus became the oldest-ever Grammy winner, edging out comedian George Burns who had won in the spoken word category 21 years earlier (he had tied with Burns, at the age of 95, in 2004).

A little more than a month later, Perkins died on 21 March 2011 at his home in Austin, Texas. At the time of his death, the musician had more than 20 performances booked for 2011. Shortly before that, while discussing his late career resurgence with an interviewer, he conceded, "I can't play piano like I used to either. I used to have bass rolling like thunder. I can't do that no more. But I ask the Lord, please forgive me for the stuff I done trying to make a nickel."

Selected discography:

-After Hours Blind Pig, 1988.
-Pinetop's Boogie Woogie Discovery, 1992.
-Got My Mojo Workin' Blues Legends, 1995.
-Live Top Deluge, 1995.
-Born in the Delta Telarc, 1997.
-Down in Mississippi HMG, 1998.
-Live at 85 Shanachie, 1999.
-Back on Top Telarc, 2000.
-Live at Antone's Antone's, 2000.
-Ladies Man M.C., 2004.

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