Mr. Pinetop has earned living legend status

The crowd at Antone's steps back a bit to make a path for the old man with a cane. For a few minutes, nobody cares what's happening on the stage. A burly man gently elbows his friend, who says, "I know." The wisp of a man in a yachting cap takes a chair near the shoeshine stand, while his assistant pulls over a table and takes CDs and DVDs out of a black bag and lays them out.

In a circle of middle-aged women, one of them says, "Mr. Pinetop's in the house," but only after legendary blues piano player Pinetop Perkins is settled, with a lit cigarette in his hand, do they approach.

"You got what I need," Perkins says to one of the women, as she bends forward to check out the merchandise, "but I'm too old to do anything about it." Everybody laughs, and 96-year-old Pinetop smiles broadly.

Smoking in a nightclub, making suggestive remarks — Perkins gets away with everything.

After all, who's going to tell the oldest living original Delta bluesman to put it out and keep it clean?

Like that relative youngster Willie Nelson, almost 20 years his junior, Perkins is not one to sit at home and think about all he's accomplished. When he's not on tour, Perkins goes out almost every night of the week, with his roommate and hired attendant of six years, Barry Nowlin, driving. They usually hit Antone's and Nuno's on Sixth Street, sometimes staying out for just an hour, sometimes till well past midnight.

Although he doesn't have the chops as when he replaced Otis Spann in Muddy Waters' band in 1969, Perkins can still hang on piano with young blues bands, whose members often get on their cell phones during breaks. "You're not going to believe who I just played with," they'll say.

Perkins came up with musical folk heroes such as Robert Johnson, Son House and Robert Nighthawk.

"Even at age 96, Pinetop is a money player," says Nowlin, whom Pinetop calls "Redberry," because you've gotta have a nickname to run in Pinetop's circle. "He knows that when he jams, he sells more CDs, so he's always looking to jam."

Perkins will have new product when "Joined At the Hip," a stomping electric blues CD that reunites him with former Waters bandmate Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, comes out June 8 on Cleveland's Telarc International label.

Describing Perkins' financial situation as "comfortable," his business manager, Pat Morgan, says, "Pinetop makes a lot of money when he goes out on the road," doing 30 to 40 shows a year. "He doesn't have to sell CDs to survive, but he loves to, as he calls it, hang out with the kids. When he's with the people who truly appreciate him, you can see him get visibly stronger."

And the money doesn't hurt, as Perkins sells as much as $1,000 worth of CDs and DVDs on a hot night.

Citing his early work on Sonny Boy Williamson 's essential "King Biscuit Time" radio program, in addition to his 10 years with Muddy Waters, Perkins was awarded 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," says Nowlin, "he told me, 'I want you to get my manager on the phone.' He was ready to perform again."

Three years later, Perkins, who got his nickname from his 1953 cover of Clarence Smith's "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie," won a competitive Grammy in the best traditional blues album category.

"Pinetop is the classic Chicago blues piano player," says Marcia Ball, who, like most Austin blues musicians of the '70s, was blissfully present every night when the Muddy Waters Blues Band, with Perkins on piano, played for a week at the original Antone's soon after it opened on Sixth Street in 1975.

Club owner Clifford Antone, all of 26 at the time, remained close to Perkins through the years and when he heard that the blues great was living in LaPorte, Ind., with no one to look after him, Antone and others in Austin, including former Muddy Waters harmonica player James Cotton, arranged for Perkins to move here in late 2003.

"Their idea was 'Let's get Pinetop down here so we could put our arms around him,' " says Nowlin.