Pinetop Perkins’ 80-year career still going

By SHELIA BYRD (AP) CLARKSDALE, Miss. — Noisy crowds in smoky bars don’t bother 96-year-old bluesman Pinetop Perkins.

It’s all part of his job. Most nights, after he snuffs out his menthol cigarette, Perkins slides onto the piano bench in some club and eases into a wail about hard times and treacherous women.

Perkins is believed to be the oldest of the old-time Delta blues musicians still performing. In an 80-year career, he’s traveled through juke joints, nightclubs and festival stages shared with the likes of John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters.

In a telephone interview after a gig a week before Thanksgiving at a jazz club in Oakland, Calif., the old bluesman summed up his performance simply: “Looks like the folks loved what I was doing last night.”

And he’s not done yet.

The two-time Grammy winner is at work on another album, due out in 2010.

“I thank the Lord for me being here all the time. I play any piano with a good tune,” Perkins said.

He’s outlived most of his contemporaries, though time has slowed his steps and impaired his hearing. His colleagues say the musical sagacity acquired from a lifetime in the blues remains strong.

“Perkins is appreciated in 2009 not just for his survival, but for being a classic Chicago bluesman,” said guitarist Bob Margolin, a former Muddy Waters band member. “While many younger musicians pay tribute to that music, Pinetop is that music.”

Perkins comes from the generation of artists who worked their way from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, stopping in Memphis and St. Louis along the way. They eventually fused a new sound of country twang and urban grit that became known as Chicago blues.

Perkins wasn’t formally taught on the piano. He learned by watching others, and he still can’t read sheet music. Yet his style has influenced rock icons like the Rolling Stones and Ike Turner.

“I didn’t get no schooling. I come up the hard way in the world,” Perkins told The Associated Press.

With age comes faded memories and blurred details, and Perkins has difficulty recalling his experiences with Waters and other bluesmen.

However, when asked about his longevity during a break at a recent music tribute to him in Clarksdale, Perkins replied: “I always try to do something different all the time.”

The Pinetop Perkins Homecoming was held in October at Hopson Plantation, where Perkins worked as a tractor-driver in the 1940s.

About a dozen blues players performed before a crowd of hundreds while Perkins sat quietly at a table, smoking cigarettes, a habit he picked up at age 9. He’d played the day before at the annual Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival.

“It’s simply amazing for a 96-year-old man to still be able to perform on a piano like that. He just lays back and relaxes and seems like the music just pumps out of his fingers,” said Jimmi Mayes, a drummer who plays in the band of another Muddy Waters band alumnus: Willie “Big Eyes” Smith of Chicago.

In addition to playing the blues, Perkins seeks to nurture them. The Pinetop Perkins Foundation was created to help young blues artists. The foundation received a grant last week from Morgan Freeman’s foundation to provide scholarships for a blues piano workshop planned for next August in Clarksdale, said Perkins’ manager, Pat Morgan.

Perkins and Smith are wrapping work on “Pinetop Perkins-Willie Smith Joined at the Hip” for the Telarc International label. The record, expected to be released next spring, includes mostly original songs written by Smith, Morgan said.

Perkins, whose real first name is Willie, was born in 1913 in Belzoni, Miss. He’s lived the evolution of blues music, spending his early years playing in the Delta. In the 1940s, he performed with Williamson on the popular King Biscuit Time radio show broadcast daily on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas.

Perkins backed slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk on an early Chess Records recording and toured with Turner in the 1950s. Later, Perkins joined Muddy Waters’ band to replace pianist Otis Spann in 1969.

For more than half a century, Perkins was content being a blues sideman.

“He may not have been a front man all those years, but he was there in the middle of it. He was skilled enough to be able to stay and do it all of his life, and move from one big band to the next and do it all as times changed,” said Brett Bonner, editor of Living Blues Magazine.

“Boogie Woogie King” was Perkins’ first solo record in 1976. Beginning in 1992 with “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” he released a string of 15 albums in as many years.

He won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2005, followed by the 2007 Best Traditional Blues Album for his collaboration on the “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas.”

With an ailing heart, Perkins moved to Austin, Texas, in 2004. He has no family, and lives with Barry Nowlin, a Morgan associate.

“He got into a different environment and he started feeling better and got out of his health risk,” Nowlin said. “Then, he won his lifetime Grammy award, and after that he got up and decided he wanted to keep playing music and performing.”

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Biography from PinetopPerkins.com:

Pinetop Perkins is one of the last great Mississippi bluesmen still performing. He began playing blues around 1927 and is widely regarded as one of the best blues pianists. He’s created a style of playing that has influenced three generations of piano players and will continue to be the yardstick by which great blues pianists are measured.

Born Willie Perkins, in Belzoni, MS, in 1913, Pinetop started out playing guitar and piano at house parties and honky-tonks but dropped the guitar in the 1940s after sustaining a serious injury in his left arm. Perkins worked primarily in the Mississippi Delta throughout the thirties and forties, spending three years with Sonny Boy Williamson on the King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA, Helena, Arkansas. Pinetop also toured extensively with slide guitar player Robert Nighthawk and backed him on an early Chess session. After briefly working with B.B. King in Memphis, Perkins barnstormed the South with Earl Hooker during the early fifties. The pair completed a session for Sam Phillips’ famous Sun Records in 1953. It was at this session that he recorded his version of Pinetop Smith’s Boogie Woogie.

Still, with recent successes the exception, Pinetop is best known for holding down the piano chair in the great Muddy Waters Band for twelve years during the highest point of Muddy’s career. Replacing the late, great Otis Spann in 1969, Pinetop helped shape the Waters sound and anchored Muddy’s memorable combo throughout the seventies with his brilliant piano solos. In 1980, Pinetop and other Waters alumni decided to go out on their own and formed the Legendary Blues Band. Legendary recorded two records for Rounder and toured extensively.

Pinetop, who had been labeled a sideman throughout most of his career, eventually left Legendary to concentrate on a solo career. Within two years, he had his first domestic record as a frontman and had a most impressive touring schedule. Since going solo, Pinetop has been featured on many nationally syndicated news and music shows, and appeared in numerous movie productions, as well as television and radio ads. He has also headlined nearly every major showcase room in North America and most of the major festivals around the world.

It’s certainly ironic that Pinetop waited for his eighth decade to blossom as a headliner releasing 15 solo records in 15 years beginning in 1992. Born In the Delta (a multimedia enhanced CD), his Telarc debut, documented an amazing historical figure and had an abundance of entertainment value for a contemporary audience. On his 1998 release, Legends, Pinetop collaborated with master blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin. Together, they blended the traditional delta blues sound with modern electric blues rock, showcasing the spirit and energy of the music. Both CDs were nominated for Grammy’s –in 1997 and 2000 respectively. This was followed by a 2005 Grammy nomination for Ladies Man released by MC Records.

In 2005 he was also presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammy’s. In 2000 he received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He has been featured in the documentary Piano Blues directed by Clint Eastwood for the Martin Scorsese PBS series, The Blues. In addition, he continued to win the Blues Music Award for best blues piano every year until 2003 when he was retired from that award, which now bears his name–the Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year.

In 2007, still on the road in his 94th year, Pinetop Perkins’ unique life was chronicled in Peter Carlson’s biographical documentary DVD, Born In The Honey, which includes a live CD with a rare studio outtake track.

Beyond his musical accomplishments Pinetop is a friendly, charming, and gentle man. He says yes to everything and goes where he’s taken, but somehow, life turns out well for him. He’s quick to joke and play with words and he still goes out every night. He loves people and makes everyone around him feel good. Then he plays the piano and sings his blues and brings us his special gift.