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Pinetop Perkins 1913- 2011
(Laura Skelding AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
- Photos: Remembering Pinetop Perkins
Legendary piano player Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins, who gave Austin a walking, talking, piano thumping monument to the blues when he moved here in 2003, passed away from cardiac arrest Monday at his home in North Austin. The oldest-ever Grammy winner, whose third golden gramophone came last month, Perkins was 97.
When the Rolling Stones played Austin for the first time in October 2006 at Zilker Park, the sight they most wanted to see was Perkins backstage before their show.
Even in failing health, Perkins went to Antone’s nightclub three or four times a week to sell CDs and DVDs and chat with fans, who couldn’t believe they were hanging out with the piano player in Muddy Waters’ great band from 1969 until 1980. He was often called onstage to jam, including Saturday at South by Southwest, when he played piano for fellow Mississippi native Bobby Rush.
Although Perkins is not survived by relatives, Susan Antone said “he was a member of our family, not just the Antone’s family, but the Austin family.”
An original Mississippi Delta bluesman, Perkins came up with musical folk heroes such as Robert Johnson and Son House and played on Sonny Boy Williamson ‘s essential “King Biscuit Time” radio program in the 1940s, He received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2005.
That recognition, plus the comfort he felt in his new hometown of Austin, ended a four-year retirement. “As soon as we got back from that trip to LA,” his fulltime caregiver Barry Nowlin told the American Statesman last year, “he told me, ‘I want you to get my manager on the phone.’ He was ready to perform again.”
Perkins, who got his nickname from his 1953 cover of Clarence Smith’s “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” had a special relationship with Antone’s and the club’s owner Clifford Antone since the mid-’70s, when the Muddy Waters Blues Band was booked at the club’s original Sixth Street location for a week. Among those in the crowd for every performance were Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan, plus piano player Marcia Ball, who called Perkins “the classic Chicago blues piano player.”
Antone was instrumental in convincing Perkins, who had been fleeced of all his money by an associate, to move to Austin from LaPorte, Ind.
“Their idea was ‘Let’s get Pinetop down here so we could put our arms around him,’ ” Nowlin said of Antone and former Waters harmonica player James Cotton, who lives in South Austin. .
Perkins was revitalized by the move to Austin, Nowlin said, but so were many local musicians, who were amazed to see the blues giant sitting in at honky-tonks as well as blues joints.
“For me, Austin’s been a place where we all came because there’s a pure love of music … with no discrimination of styles,” Ball said. “To see Pinetop at the Broken Spoke just tied together so much of what Austin’s about musically.”
Perkins and Antone were almost inseparable. “It was really an ageless thing,” said Clifford Antone’s sister Susan. “They were just very close. When Clifford died (in May 2006), Pine was devastated.”
“People in Austin treasure Pinetop and take care of him,” his manager Pat Morgan told the American Statesman last year.
Although best known as the piano player who replaced the great Otis Spann in the Waters band, rock historians also place Perkins at the birth of rock n’ roll. Perkins’ protege Ike Turner played piano on 1951’s “Rocket 88,” which Memphis producer Sam Phillips called the first rock n’ roll record. Perkins taught Turner how to set the rhythm with his left hand on the piano, while aping horn lines with his right hand. But Perkins never carried himself as a blues legend. “He loves everybody the same, whether it’s the president of the United States or the guy on Sixth Street who just asked him for spare change,” said Nowlin.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
- From the archive: Mr. Pinetop Perkins has earned living legend status
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