DELTA MAGAZINE

In Praise of Pinetop
Honoring Pinetop Perkins, the elder statesman of the blues

At 94, Pinetop Perkins is the elder statesman of the blues, and he doesn’t show many signs of slowing down. Those looking for his secret might not care to adopt his now 86-year-long cigarette habit or his steady diet of McDonalds’ double cheeseburgers and apple pie, but may consider heeding his simple advice to “just keep livin’ long as you can.”

For most of his years in the blues, Pinetop worked as a sideman, but over the last several decades he’s been at center stage. Hopson Plantation in Clarksdale, where Pinetop worked in the ‘40s, holds an annual homecoming festival in his honor, and earlier this year he received a Grammy award for his participation on the CD, Last of the Great Mississppi Delta Bluesman: Live In Dallas.

Receiving the award with him was old friend David “Honeyboy” Edwards, now 92, but their achievement was bittersweet. Since the album was recorded, the two other featured artists, Robert Lockwood, Jr. and Henry Townsend, have died. Both men had also continued performing into their nineties, and their deaths drove home the fact that there are precious few living links to the blues’ early years.

grew up on various plantations in the mid-Delta, spending long days picking and chopping cotton. His first instrument was the guitar, and by his early teens he was playing at social gatherings. He left home at 16, and around the same time started playing piano. Perkins’ musical abilities allowed him to largely avoid menial farm work, and over the years he worked as a truck driver, piano tuner, moonshine maker and gambling house operator.

In the mid-’30s he began a long association with guitarist Robert Nighthawk, a major influence on both B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and formed his first band together with Lee Kizart, who, like Perkins, played both guitar and piano. Ultimately, Perkins’ decision to concentrate on piano was forced—a drunken woman at a bar in Helena attacked him with a knife, severing the tendons in his arm.

Perkins found regional acclaim in the early ’40s when he began performing on Nighthawk’s radio program on Helena’s KFFA. Soon he moved over to the KFFA program King Biscuit Time, hosted by harmonica great Sonnny Williamson II, that broadcasted every weekday at lunchtime.

Performing music wasn’t necessarily lucrative, and around this time Perkins began working as a tractor driver at Hopson.

“I looked at them driving ‘em and learned how they did it,” he recalls. “Then I started doing it myself, and they started paying me.”

Perkins helped make history at Hopson, where the first full cotton crop was harvested using mechanized pickers. Like fellow bluesmen and tractor drivers B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Son House, Perkins earned a deferment from active duty during WWII, as producing cotton crops was deemed essential to the war effort. At one point, Perkins recalls, he was loaded onto a military bus, but was removed after an overseer at Hopson intervened.

“I didn’t mind fighing for my uncle,” Perkins says. “But I didn’t know I had an uncle named Sam.”

While living in the Clarksdale area, Perkins served as the mentor of a young Ike Turner, who spent the money his mother gave him for formal lessons at the pool hall and learned instead at the feet of Perkins. In 1951, Turner’s piano work propelled what many regard as the first rock ‘n’ roll song, “Rocket 88.” The song was released under the name of Jackie Brenston, the vocalist in Turner’s group the Kings of Rhythm.

Perkins ultimately left Hopson and Clarksdale after a dispute with a plantation manager.

“He shot my dog,” Perkins says. “And I loved that dog, too. And I got out of there because I thought that he was going to shoot me next.”

Over the next several decades Perkins worked on the road, staying for extended periods in Memphis, St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois. He continued to perform with Nighthawk, with whom he recorded for the Aristocrat label, and began a long partnership with guitarist Earl Hooker, a native of the Clarksdale area. In 1953, Hooker backed Perkins at a recording session at Memphis’ Sun Records. One of the songs they cut was a cover of Pinetop Smith’s 1928 hit “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” the song that lent Perkins’ his nickname.

Hooker’s band was popular on the downhome blues circuit, and in 1968 the Hooker and Perkins’ wonderful interplay was captured on the Arhoolie album Two Bugs and Roach.

Perkins gained even greater exposure in 1969, when he replaced the newly deceased Otis Spann as Muddy Waters’ pianist. Perkins subsequently appeared on many of Waters’ albums, and during a spotlight segment at live performances would sing Caldonia and Kansas City, which remain staples of his live performances today.
Perkins worked with Waters until the early ’80s, when he and several other band members became frustrated over money and formed the Legendary Blues Band. Perkins recorded several albums with that band, and in 1988 cut his first solo album, After Hours, on the Blind Pig label.

He’s since recorded extensively as both a leader and a sideman, and his colorful life story was recently captured in the documentary “Born in the Honey.” His accolades include the NEA’s prestigious National Heritage Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy award; and several years ago the Blues Foundation rechristened the Blues Music Award for best pianist in his name, partly in order to allow someone else to win.

Perkins now lives in Austin, Texas, where he goes out every night he’s in town to clubs to sit in and sell his CDs. He maintains a busy touring schedule, both leading his own band and performing with the Muddy Waters Tribute Band.

Here in his home state, Perkins will be honored with his own Mississippi Blues Trail marker in Belzoni on Saturday, May 3rd. He’ll perform the same day at the Pinetop Perkins Blues Festival in Belzoni, and later in the evening, the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis. The following Friday he’ll be on hand for the dedication of a Blues Trail Marker at Hopson and will perform with Kenny Wayne Shepherd at the Grand Casino in Tunica, and on Saturday the 10th he performs with the Muddy Waters Tribute Band at Robert Johnson Blues Foundation’s Blues Jam in Crystal Springs.

In tandem with Perkins’ 95th birthday, Telarc will release the CD Pinetop Perkins and Friends, which features collaborations with admirers including B.B. King and Eric Clapton.

© 2008 Coopwood Magazines, Inc