For anyone who loves the blues and is familiar with the great group of delta bluesmen that gave this country so much great music, this is a very sad passing.
Pinetop Perkins was one of my favorites. I am not overly fond of the piano but I did love to hear this ole' rascal bang away on the ivory. I was fortunate to see Pinetop play in a very small club in the Phoenix area many, many years ago with John Lee Hooker, and the John Mayall Blues Band just happened to drop in for a few sets. The music lasted until 3:00 A.M. and I had to be at the bowling alley at 8:00 the same morning to bowl in regionals for Northern Arizona University. I was NOT feeling well at all(go figure!) and we were bowling against ASU, U of A, Brigham Young(BYU), The Idaho schools and a couple from Nevada. Bad as I felt I managed to roll a 686 my first three games and a 715 the second set of three games. The 715 was the fourth highest series I bowled in my life before I had to quit bowling due to a wrecked shoulder.
I grew up with the blues, country and jazz. My dad was one of the first country DJ's is the country and that is all the music I ever knew as a kid except when my Mom played classical music which I grew to love. Pinetop, in my humble opinion was one of the best players to out of the delta region. Let alone the entire country.
Thanks for all the great years and music. Pinetop, this beer, whiskey and cigar are for you!
**********************************************************************************
 |
| Pinetop Perkins |
Pinetop Perkins, boogie-woogie master of Delta blues, dies at 97
New York Times News Service
Pinetop Perkins, the boogie-woogie piano player who worked in Muddy Waters’ last great band and was among the last surviving members of the first generation of Delta bluesmen, died Monday at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by Hugh Southard, his agent for the past 15 years.
From his days in the groups of Waters and the slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk to the vigorous solo career he fashioned over the last 20 years, Perkins’ accomplishments were numerous and considerable. His longevity as a performer was remarkable — all the more so considering his fondness for cigarettes and alcohol; by his own account he began smoking at age 9 and didn’t quit drinking until he was 82. Few people working in any popular art form have been as prolific in the ninth and 10th decades of their lives.
A sideman for most of his career, Perkins did not release an album under his own name until his 75th year. From then until his death he made more than a dozen records on which he was the leader. His 2008 album, “Pinetop Perkins & Friends” (Telarc), included contributions from admirers like B.B. King and Eric Clapton. His last album, released in 2010, was “Joined at the Hip” (Telarc), a collaboration with the harmonica player Willie “Big Eyes” Smith.
Perkins’ durability was born of the resilience and self-reliance he developed as a child growing up on a plantation in Honey Island, Miss., in the years leading up to the Great Depression.
“I grew up hard,” he said in a 2008 interview with No Depression, the American roots music magazine. “I picked cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano.”
“What I learned I learned on my own,” he continued. “I didn’t have much school. Three years.”
The author Robert Gordon, in his book “Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters,” wrote that Perkins “learned to play in the same school as Muddy — a cotton field, where the conjugation was done with a hoe and the school lunch was a fish sandwich and homemade whiskey.”
Originally a guitarist, Perkins concentrated exclusively on the piano after an incident, in 1943, in which a dancer at a juke joint attacked him with a knife, severing the tendons in his left arm. The injury left him unable to hold a guitar or manage its fretboard.
In 1943 Perkins moved to Helena, Ark., to work with Nighthawk. He later joined Sonny Boy Williamson’s King Biscuit Boys, before moving on to the band of the slide guitarist Earl Hooker.
He also appeared on the recordings that Nighthawk made for the Chess label and that Hooker made for Sun in the 1950s. It was for Sun, in 1953, that he cut his first version of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” the song that furnished him with his nickname and became his signature number. He appropriated the tune from the repertory of the barrelhouse piano player Clarence Smith, who was also known as Pinetop.
Perkins has also been credited with teaching Ike Turner how to play the piano. Rock and pop pianists like Elton John, Billy Joel and Gregg Allman have said they were influenced by his exuberant, down-home style of playing.
Joe Willie Perkins was born on July 7, 1913, in Belzoni, Miss. His parents separated when he was 6. Perkins, who dropped out of school after the third grade, taught himself the rudiments of blues guitar on a homemade instrument called a diddley bow: a length of wire stretched between nails driven into a wall. He began entertaining at dances and house parties at age 10 and soon learned to play the piano as well. While still in his teens he left Mississippi and traveled to Chicago.
He eventually returned to the Delta, where he drove a tractor in the cotton fields, but he again made Chicago his home in the late ’50s.He wasn’t very active as musician there, though, until Hooker enlisted him to appear on an album he was making for Arhoolie Records in 1968. When the pianist Otis Spann left Waters’ band the next year, Perkins, whose lean gutbucket style contrasted with Spann’s more florid playing, was recruited to replace him.
0 Comments - Share Yours!:
Post a Comment