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Goodnight Pinetop

By Bob Margolin

Photo By Amy Brat

So many of the musical family of Pinetop Perkins called me on the day he passed and said the same thing: “I thought he would live forever!” His ninety-seven-years-long life was a blessing for his music and his sweet personality as well as a miracle of improbable survival. Pinetop smoked since 1922 and ate at McDonald’s every day. He hung out in blues bars every night. He drank until he was eighty-five. If he sat in with a band at Antone’s in Austin on a Monday night, he gave the same show that he might be paid $10,000 for headlining a festival in Europe the next weekend. He looked great in what he called his “Daniel Boone pimp” sharp clothes, flirted boldly with five generations of women, and was quick to make a silly or clever pun or laugh at himself.

I met Pinetop when I joined Muddy Waters’ band in 1973. Pinetop was about the age that I am now. I’m aware of that circle closing. In 1980, I started my own band, Muddy got a new band, and Pinetop and most of the others stayed together as The Legendary Blues Band. On April 30, 1983, I got a before-dawn call from Jerry Portnoy, who was the Muddy’s harp player when I was there and then with Legendary: “I have some bad news.” Because Jerry currently worked with Pinetop, I thought Pinetop must have died. Pinetop was seventy then, ancient to me. It was Muddy who had died, but I knew that if I lived long enough myself, someday I’d get that “bad news” call about Pinetop.Thank God, Pinetop had almost twenty-eight more years of living to do.

 On Monday, March 21, 2011, I finally got that call. Because I’ve gigged and recorded with Pinetop so often since 1973 and am known to have been helpful to him on- and offstage, folks are sharing their grief and their smiles about Pinetop with me. And I want to share mine with you.

Musically, Pinetop is a Blues Legend, though not in the same way as B.B., Muddy, or John Lee. Though they are from the same generation and from Mississippi, those legends had Blues hit records from the early 1950s. Pinetop got well-known in the 1970s, when he was already older, and he was noticed in Muddy’s very visible band.

Pinetop’s age and Mississippi/Chicago roots and survival in modern times are part of his appeal from the ’80s on, but Pinetop aces the ultimate test of a musician: Pinetop has his own instantly-recognizable voice on the piano and in his singing. His piano playing didn’t have the virtuosity of the younger Otis Spann, his predecessor in Muddy’s band, or the astounding chops of so many of today’s finest players. But he played blues piano with swing, soul, sex, and fun and sounded like nobody but himself. Until last weekend he could still deliver that, though with less assertion than his powerful performances from when he was just a few years younger. And his warm, friendly singing ranged from heartbroken to boisterous. His trademark sound as a piano player and a singer is now classic, part of the language of blues music. Beyond that is a more important achievement: He made people happy with his music for more than eighty years.

Offstage, Pinetop was sweet, friendly, and charming to all (well, sometimes a little cranky if he was uncomfortable). In the last few years he lost a lot of his hearing, though high-tech hearing aids helped. He also became forgetful, as happens to so many who are a lot younger. But neither problem had progressed to the point where he couldn’t enjoy himself every day, know his friends even if he would sometimes forget a familiar name, and inspire all who were blessed to meet him in person. Besides great genes, he had a playful young-at-heart attitude that is always cited as an ingredient of longevity.

But beyond being relaxed, Pinetop simply would not deal with adversity and worry. He just lived in the moment. Maybe that’s immature or irresponsible, but how many of us “adults” will live as long and well as Pinetop did? Muddy observed about Pinetop, “Once a man, twice a child,” and he said it sarcastically while Pinetop was keeping the band waiting to leave a gig, oblivious and enjoying talking to fans at the end of the night. Muddy was right about Pinetop, but Pinetop’s child-like sociability was a blessing. Muddy was often heavy hearted, and had a much shorter lifespan.

Pinetop’s success in the last few years is quite an accomplishment and legacy for him, His manager, Pat Morgan, really deserves credit for helping him be recognized and compensated as a great bluesman. Plenty of great musicians are and will remain obscure. She vigilantly took care of his health, conceived career goals nobody but her could even imagine – like the Pinetop Perkins Foundation and his Grammy Awards — and did the hard work to make them happen. Pat is smart, strong, tough and she loves Pinetop. Managing his career and life was as hard as herding cats, but it’s safe to say that Pinetop would neither have lived so long nor been as successful without Pat Morgan. Pat, I know Pinetop appreciated you and everyone who knows the story of you and him does too.

Many of our friends who knew him in the last thirty years talk about how “color-blind” Pinetop was. He truly loved all people. But consider that he was born African-American in Mississippi in 1913, and he told of being raised by a mean grandmother. He ran away from her after she beat him and was on his own ever since. Pinetop was genuinely as sweet as he appeared, but he was a feeling and thinking man, not just a happy piano player in a bright suit. He had lived with racism and hard times. When he couldn’t make enough money playing music, he was very handy working on cars, back in the day when engines weren’t computerized.

Pinetop knew blues, the feeling, not just the music, as recently as the mid-1990s. When his wife passed in Chicago, he began drinking too much, but still drove around as he always had. He was stopped by a cop in Chicago for driving with an open container of alcohol. Pinetop said he was “recycling,” but the cop put him in jail. His friends helped him as much as possible, and Pinetop went to a half-way house and quit drinking because he had to. He took Antabuse and had an ankle monitor. Can you imagine doing that in your early eighties? This sweet, fragile old man must have been a lot stronger than he looked.

He was good at letting go of bitterness, but I remember one rare time when I saw that he was very aware of exactly who he was, what blues is, and the world he lived in. We were in Muddy’s band in the mid-’70s, touring Europe, and a journalist was interviewing Muddy in the lobby of a hotel. Pinetop was standing nearby, uncharacteristically scowling, so I asked him why. He explained, “I hate these f-in’ interviews, they always ask the same two questions – What does the blues mean to you? And when’s the last time you ate watermelon?” Think about the depth, social understanding, and bluesy expression in the mind of an already old Pinetop. 

Personally for me, spending almost seven intense years onstage standing between Pinetop and Muddy Waters, with Willie “Big Eyes” Smith’s drums driving us, was a foundation for who I am since. Pinetop was the oldest and I was the youngest in Muddy’s band, but we would go out together after Muddy’s shows and jam with other bands and close down bars. 

I watched out for him as a grandson would for a spry grandfather (he was older than my own father), and I hope some of his grace and spirit rubbed off on me. People who have seen me help Pinetop over the years – whether guiding him back to our hotel at dawn thirty-five years ago or pushing him around in a wheelchair in Spain last year – presume I was kind to him and loved him. Of course that’s true, but he was sweet to me too. I could feel it every time we were together or talked on the phone, and especially when we played blues together. But the time I could feel it the most was when we were playing in Japan in 1998, and my father died back in the U.S. When I told Pine I was going to leave the tour and fly home right away, he put his arm around me and said, “I’m your black daddy now.”

Goodnight, Daddy Pinetop. I never thought this day would come: I actually wish I could hear Pinetop snore one more time even if he did sound like two mules being trampled by a herd of cows, one more time.