“I always say I’m more of a squawker than I am a talker, but I do the best I can,” Pinetop Perkins said with a laugh during a 2005 interview with Bill DeMain for Performing Songwriter. Yesterday the 97-year-old blues legend left the earth after almost eight decades of what he deemed squawking, while speaking eloquently through the 88 keys on his piano (the first 20 years he worked the Mississippi Delta circuit as a guitarist).

In the history of blues, Perkins was something of a Zelig. He backed Sonny Boy Williamson, Earl Hooker, B.B. King and many others. He played sessions in the early days of both the Sun and Chess labels. Most famously, he was the driving force in Muddy Waters’ band from 1968-1980.

Along with contemporaries Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons, Perkins perfected a fiery boogie-woogie style—a left hand that pounds out complex bass patterns while his right dances over syncopated horn lines—that was the blueprint for the sound of the swing bands of the 1930s—from Goodman to Miller.

You could even make a case that Perkins was one of the prime movers of rock ‘n’ roll. In the 1940s, he taught a young guitarist named Ike Turner how to play piano. In 1951, Turner co-wrote “Rocket 88,” widely considered to be the first-ever rock ‘n’ roll song. Turner said, “When I was doing ‘Rocket 88,’ I was just doing what Pinetop Perkins taught me to play on the piano.”

Perkins commented, “Well, you know me and Muddy put out a record that said ‘The blues had a baby and named it rock ‘n’ roll.’”

Joe Willie Perkins was born in Belzoni, Miss., on July 7, 1913. “It was rough,” he said of his childhood. “I didn’t get no good schooling. I only made third grade in school.” But he found solace in the guitar. “I started when I was 10 years old. I liked Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy, and I’d listen to their records and learn how to pick the guitar.”

By age 12, Perkins was playing house parties and working part-time repairing pianos. “The man learned me how to fix the piano a long time ago—his name was Scott Morris,” Perkins said. “That’s when I started playing piano. But nobody learned me nothing on the piano. I’d buy records and learn that stuff off of that. I love all the piano players, but sometimes I steal some of their licks. But I don’t read music at all. I play by ear. Look like people like what I’m doing, so it’s OK. Everywhere I go I have a packed house.”

In admiration of one of his mentors, Clarence “Pinetop” Smith (who wrote “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie”), Perkins borrowed his nickname. Though he was adept on the piano, guitar remained his bread and butter. Then, in the mid-1940s, tragedy struck. A chorus girl in Helena, Ark., mistaking Perkins for her ex-lover, attacked him. “Stabbed my hand and my arm so I can’t play the guitar no more,” he said. “I was bleeding like a stuck hog.”

By the time Perkins moved to Chicago in the mid-1950s, he’d reinvented himself as one of the pianists who would define that city’s blues sound. Asked to describe the Chicago style, he said, “Blues is a feeling. It wasn’t in Chicago. It was in Mississippi. Back then, I got 50 cents for a whole day’s wages. That’s enough to be the blues. I think the blues in Chicago come from Mississippi. Like Muddy Waters, he was a Mississippi boy. All came from Mississippi.”

Perkins still had gigs booked for this year, and was seen out in Austin just last week. Of performing in his ninth decade, he said, “Since I got older, it ain’t too much of a joy for me now. But I try to do the best I can. I want to quit it, but I can’t. That’s all I know to do. I pray to the Lord all the time to forgive me for the stuff I’m doing. I’m trying to make people happy and make a dollar or two. I hope He listen to me.”

Perkins’ most recent project was 2010’s Joined at the Hip, a collaborative project with his friend Willie “Big Eyes” Smith who had been the drummer in Muddy Waters’ band. That release won him the record as the oldest Grammy winner when he took home the award for best traditional blues album.

Thanks for a lifetime of music, Pinetop. You made the world a better place for almost a century, and you will be missed.

— Interview by Bill DeMain from Performing Songwriter Issue 86, June 2005

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