Pinetop Perkins played piano for Muddy Waters, lived to 97, and won a Grammy at that age -- the oldest Grammy winner ever. He was the last living link to the Mississippi Delta's pre-war piano tradition, a man who'd learned from the originals and played boogie-woogie until the very end.
Joe Willie Perkins was born in Belzoni, Mississippi, and was playing guitar and piano by his teens -- until a knife fight with a chorus girl in Helena, Arkansas left the tendons in his left arm severed. He switched to piano full-time and never looked back. He played with Sonny Boy Williamson on the King Biscuit Time radio show, with Earl Hooker, and finally with Muddy Waters, replacing Otis Spann in 1969.
He didn't start recording as a solo artist until he was in his seventies. His album Born in the Delta won a Grammy. At 97, he won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy -- the oldest person ever to receive one. Pinetop Perkins had seen the Delta before electricity.
He lived long enough to see the blues honored at the White House. The piano never stopped.
