Pinetop Perkins Movies and Career Information

Pinetop Perkins (born Joseph William Perkins, July 7, 1913) is an American Blues musician. Perkins, whose specialty is the piano, currently shares the distinction with one of his lifelong friends, David Honeyboy Edwards, as being the oldest living Delta blues performers who continue to tour and perform from the past century. He has played with some of the most influential blues and rock and roll performers in American history, and received honors that include the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and induction into the Blues Hall of Fame. Perkins was born in Belzoni, Mississippi. He began his career as a guitarist, but then injured the tendons in his left arm in a fight with a choirgirl in Helena, Arkansas. Unable to play guitar, Perkins switched to the piano, and also switched from Robert Nighthawk's KFFA radio program to Sonny Boy Williamson's King Biscuit Time. He continued working with Nighthawk, however, accompanying him on 1950's "Jackson Town Gal". In the 1950s, Perkins joined Earl Hooker and began touring, stopping to record "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" (written by Pinetop Smith) at Sam Phillips' studio in Memphis, Tennessee. ("They used to call me Pinetop," he recalled,