Pinetop Perkins, who died on March 21 aged 97, was the senior exponent of the boogie-woogie style of blues piano and a key influence on the development of rock and roll.
Pinetop Perkins Photo: WIREIMAGE
Boogie-woogie, or barrelhouse, is a kind of blues cousin to ragtime in which the pianist maintains a rolling rhythm with the right hand (akin to a banjo player strumming at a dance) while the left underpins it with bass notes.
The style, which was first developed in the late 19th century, reached a peak of popularity in America in the 1930s and 1940s, in part due to the frequent playing by the bandleader Tommy Dorsey of a number called Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.
This had been written by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith, a pianist shot dead at the age of 25 in a dance hall fight in 1929. Thereafter it became the signature tune of Perkins, who acquired the nickname “Pinetop” by association, and cut a memorable version of the song for Sun Records — the future label of Elvis Presley — in 1953.
The rollicking riffs of barrelhouse, epitomised by the playing of pianists such as Meade “Lux” Lewis, influenced first the direction of swing in the 1930s and 1940s and later rockabilly acts such as Presley and Carl Perkins.
Pinetop Perkins himself did not become widely known until the 1960s, but two decades earlier he had been the principal musical influence on the young Ike Turner, who was first drawn to music by hearing Perkins’s chops through an open window while walking home from school.
Perkins taught Turner to play the piano, and it was his upbeat style that is at the heart of Turner’s sound on Rocket 88, the 1950 track cited by many musicologists as the first rock and roll recording.
Joe Willie Perkins was born on July 7 1913 near Belzoni, Mississippi, where his parents worked on the land. He grew up on Deadman’s Plantation, Honey Island, Mississippi, and by the age of 13 had taught himself the guitar. “I didn’t get no schooling,” he said in 2009. “I come up the hard way in the world.”
He soon began to play at the jukes, dives and honky-tonks of the area for farmers and itinerant cotton pickers, as well as at house parties. By his late teens he had built himself a piano out of spare parts, tuned it with his guitar, and taught himself the rudiments of barrelhouse.
Throughout the 1930s he worked on a plantation near Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, while also playing the music circuit based around Indianola in the same state. Then still primarily a guitarist, in the early 1940s he teamed up first with the slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk, and later with the harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson, on whose King Biscuit Time radio programme he frequently appeared.
Then, in about 1943, Perkins was forced to change his musical direction when — as he told the story — he was stabbed in the arm by a berserk chorus girl who had been barricaded by her ex-husband in the bathroom of a bar in which Perkins was drinking at Helena, Arkansas.
In the ensuing altercation, the tendons of Perkins’s left arm and hand were so severely damaged that he was unable to hold a guitar again, and so he concentrated on his piano playing.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, he recorded with Nighthawk in Chicago, and also worked with bluesmen such as Albert King and Earl Hooker; but it was not until 1969 that he came to the fore among blues players when he was asked to replace Otis Spann in Muddy Waters’s band — Muddy’s use of the electric guitar had revolutionised and defined the sound of modern blues.
Perkins played with Waters for the next decade, establishing himself as one of the best-known pianists in blues and inspiring contemporaries such as Professor Longhair and Dr John and, later, Jools Holland. He also worked occasionally with Howlin’ Wolf, and had fond memories of those in the audience who would jibe at his penchant for loud suits (a taste Perkins shared). “What you laughin’ for?” Wolf would ask. “I got me enough money to burn up a wet mule.”
Perkins appeared in The Last Waltz (1978), the documentary directed by Martin Scorsese about The Band’s last concert after 16 years on the road.
In 1981 Perkins and the rest of Waters’s group quit in a dispute over money and formed the Legendary Blues Band. Thereafter Perkins began to record frequently as a leader in his own right, releasing LPs such as After Hours (1988) and Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie (1992). In 1998 his album Legends, recorded with Hubert Sumlin, another veteran of Howlin’ Wolf’s line-up, was nominated for a Grammy, and several times in his eighties he was voted Best Blues Pianist at the WC Handy blues awards.
Perkins won a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2005, and further Grammys — for best traditional blues album — in 2007 and in February this year.
Perkins began smoking at the age of nine, and did not give up drinking until he was in his early eighties. A man of few words, he continued to play into his nineties, appearing regularly at Rosa’s Club on Chicago’s West Side and, since 2004, when he moved to Texas, at clubs in Austin.
Pinetop Perkins is believed to have been once married and divorced, and to have had four children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8399125/Pinetop-Perkins.html
Joe Willie Perkins was born on July 7 1913 near Belzoni, Mississippi, where his parents worked on the land. He grew up on Deadman’s Plantation, Honey Island, Mississippi, and by the age of 13 had taught himself the guitar. “I didn’t get no schooling,” he said in 2009. “I come up the hard way in the world.”
He soon began to play at the jukes, dives and honky-tonks of the area for farmers and itinerant cotton pickers, as well as at house parties. By his late teens he had built himself a piano out of spare parts, tuned it with his guitar, and taught himself the rudiments of barrelhouse.
Throughout the 1930s he worked on a plantation near Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, while also playing the music circuit based around Indianola in the same state. Then still primarily a guitarist, in the early 1940s he teamed up first with the slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk, and later with the harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson, on whose King Biscuit Time radio programme he frequently appeared.
Then, in about 1943, Perkins was forced to change his musical direction when — as he told the story — he was stabbed in the arm by a berserk chorus girl who had been barricaded by her ex-husband in the bathroom of a bar in which Perkins was drinking at Helena, Arkansas.
In the ensuing altercation, the tendons of Perkins’s left arm and hand were so severely damaged that he was unable to hold a guitar again, and so he concentrated on his piano playing.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, he recorded with Nighthawk in Chicago, and also worked with bluesmen such as Albert King and Earl Hooker; but it was not until 1969 that he came to the fore among blues players when he was asked to replace Otis Spann in Muddy Waters’s band — Muddy’s use of the electric guitar had revolutionised and defined the sound of modern blues.
Perkins played with Waters for the next decade, establishing himself as one of the best-known pianists in blues and inspiring contemporaries such as Professor Longhair and Dr John and, later, Jools Holland. He also worked occasionally with Howlin’ Wolf, and had fond memories of those in the audience who would jibe at his penchant for loud suits (a taste Perkins shared). “What you laughin’ for?” Wolf would ask. “I got me enough money to burn up a wet mule.”
Perkins appeared in The Last Waltz (1978), the documentary directed by Martin Scorsese about The Band’s last concert after 16 years on the road.
In 1981 Perkins and the rest of Waters’s group quit in a dispute over money and formed the Legendary Blues Band. Thereafter Perkins began to record frequently as a leader in his own right, releasing LPs such as After Hours (1988) and Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie (1992). In 1998 his album Legends, recorded with Hubert Sumlin, another veteran of Howlin’ Wolf’s line-up, was nominated for a Grammy, and several times in his eighties he was voted Best Blues Pianist at the WC Handy blues awards.
Perkins won a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2005, and further Grammys — for best traditional blues album — in 2007 and in February this year.
Perkins began smoking at the age of nine, and did not give up drinking until he was in his early eighties. A man of few words, he continued to play into his nineties, appearing regularly at Rosa’s Club on Chicago’s West Side and, since 2004, when he moved to Texas, at clubs in Austin.
Pinetop Perkins is believed to have been once married and divorced, and to have had four children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8399125/Pinetop-Perkins.html
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