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Pinetop Perkins
He
admittedly wasn't the originator of the seminal piano piece "Pinetop's
Boogie Woogie," but it's a safe bet that more people associate it
nowadays with Pinetop Perkins than with the man who devised it in the
first place, Clarence "Pinetop" Smith. Although it seems as though he's
been around Chicago forever, the Mississippi native actually got a
relatively late start on his path to Windy City immortality. It was
only when Muddy Waters took him on to replace Otis Spann in 1969 that
Perkins's rolling mastery of the ivories began to assume outsized
proportions.
Perkins began his blues existence primarily as a guitarist, but a
mid-'40s encounter with an outraged chorus girl toting a knife at a
Helena, AR, nightspot left him with severed tendons in his left arm.
That dashed his guitar aspirations, but Joe Willie Perkins came back
strong from the injury, concentrating solely on piano from that point
on. Perkins had traveled to Helena with Robert Nighthawk in 1943,
playing with the elegant slide guitarist on Nighthawk's KFFA radio
program. Perkins soon switched over to rival Sonny Boy Williamson's
beloved King Biscuit Time radio show in Helena, where he remained for
an extended period. Perkins accompanied Nighthawk on a 1950 session for
the Chess brothers that produced "Jackson Town Gal," but Chicago
couldn't hold him at the time.
Nighthawk disciple Earl Hooker recruited Perkins during the early '50s.
They hit the road, pausing at Sam Phillips's studios in Memphis long
enough for Perkins to wax his first version of "Pinetop's Boogie
Woogie" in 1953. He settled in downstate Illinois for a spell, then
relocated to Chicago. Music gradually was relegated to the back burner
until Hooker coaxed him into working on an LP for Arhoolie in 1968.
When Spann split from Muddy Waters, the stage was set for Pinetop
Perkins's reemergence.
After more than a decade with the Man, Perkins and his bandmates left
en masse to form the Legendary Blues Band. Their early Rounder albums
(Life of Ease, Red Hot 'n' Blue) prominently spotlighted Perkins's
rippling 88s and rich vocals. He had previously waxed an album for the
French Black & Blue logo in 1976 and four fine cuts for
Alligator's Living Chicago Blues anthologies in 1978. Finally, in 1988,
he cut his first domestic album for Blind Pig, After Hours.Ever since
then, Pinetop Perkins has made up for precious lost time in the studio.
Discs for Antone's, Omega (Portrait of a Delta Bluesman, a solo outing
that includes fascinating interview segments), Deluge, Earwig, and
several other firms ensure that his boogie legacy won't be forgotten in
the decades to come.
-Written
by Bill Dahl
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