Legendary piano man opens 25th annual Chicago Blues Festival
Pinetop Perkins won so many W.C. Handy Awards as the best blues pianist that in 2003 he was “retired” from future consideration, and the award renamed in his honor.
The blues cognoscenti had their own informal Pinetop award, which was bestowed on any artist whose set could be described as “less energetic and soulful than Pinetop Perkins, and he’s in his 90s.” For a while, it seemed like a useful yardstick, but so many artists in their 30s and 40s kept qualifying that it quickly lost its meaning.
(Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times)
PHOTO GALLERY
Pianist Pinetop Perkins
PINETOP PERKINS
With Willie Smith, Bob Margolin, Bob Stroger and Kenny Smith
4:15-5:30 p.m. today
Chicago Blues Festival Front Porch Stage, Columbus and Jackson, Grant Park
Admission: Free
With Wayne Baker Brooks All-Star Blues Bash, featuring Lonnie Brooks, Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater, Lil' Ed and Todd Park Mohr
8 tonight
House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn
Tickets: $24.50-$26
(312) 923-2000
For the record, Perkins turns 95 on July 7. His label, Telarc, is marking the occasion with the release this week of “Pinetop Perkins and Friends,” the kind of star-studded tribute CD that allows a senior musician to rest on his laurels. B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Jimmie Vaughan are among the 14 “friends” who play with Pinetop.
But even at his advanced age, Perkins doesn’t know how to switch to a lower gear, much less coast. His new hometown is Austin, Texas, where the lively music scene makes it easy to find gigs and capable sidemen.
His own career as a sideman ran from 1928 until the mid-’80s, and he’s been making up for lost time ever since. “And Friends” is no less than his 15th album in a solo career that didn’t shift into overdrive until he was 80. His live appearance schedule is even more aggressive, as indicated by the two gigs today in his sweet old hometown.
He’s on the opening-day bill at 25th annual Chicago Blues Festival this afternoon, playing a set titled “Pinetop Perkins With More Friends.” They’ll include three of his bandmates from the great Muddy Waters bands of the 1970s who then joined Perkins in forming the Legendary Blues Band. Tonight he’ll be part of a rare blues show at the House of Blues featuring several generations of Chicago talent that he helped to nurture.
If it sounds as if Pinetop Perkins has a lot of friends, that’s his nature. He’s most interested, though, in cultivating friends of the opposite sex.
Following a lunchtime gig Tuesday at the Chicago Cultural Center, Perkins broke away from an interview — and an overdue cigarette break — to tell an attractive young woman, “I’m a ladies’ man.”
And he’s got the credentials to prove it. On a 2004 album titled “Ladies Man,” he attracted a bevy of female admirers, including Susan Tedeschi, Ruth Brown and Odetta, for vocal duties. What’s his secret? “They call me Pinetop Perkins, they call me the grindin’ man,” he half-sings, half-speaks in reply, echoing the refrain of one of his best-known songs.
At the Cultural Center gig, he was nattily turned out in a gray suit, black hat and freshly polished black shoes, wearing socks and tie with matching piano key designs.
He expresses gratitude for his late-in-life accolades, which include a traditional blues Grammy this year for the collaboration “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas.” But that’s not what drives him, he says. “I just love to play,” he states.
The State of Mississippi honored him last month with two new Blues Trail markers, one in his birthplace of Belzoni and one at Hopson’s Plantation outside Clarksdale, where he used to drive a tractor while gigging at area juke joints.
Going back to Hopson’s, where the Shack Up Inn on the property features a motel where tourists can rent the sharecropper’s shack where he once lived, brings mixed memories.
“There was a fella there who shot my dog when I worked there,” he laments, “and I thought I was next. I got out of there.”
That turned out to be a career jump-start, putting him on the road to full-time bluesman status. Soon he was gigging with Robert Nighthawk, and did a stint with Sonny Boy Williamson II on KFFA-AM in Helena, Ark. He came north for a time with Earl Hooker’s band, and later hooked up with Waters as the replacement for the great Otis Spann.
His favorite bandleader? “Muddy Waters. I loved that man. I loved the Nighthawk, too, but he had his rough side.”
So did playing the blues all these years keep you young? “It looks like it made me old,” he says with a gleam in his eye.