“I could Sing Like a Bird”: Pinetop Perkins’ Story and Stories
Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins (1913-2011) was born near Belzoni, Mississippi, where he grew up in a cotton farming family. After making a one-string diddley bow, he first learned to play guitar and then piano. At a young age he began to play house parties, graduating to the jook and barrelhouse circuit in the company of Willie Love, Boyd Gilmore, and a who’s who of Mississippi musicians before hooking up with Robert Nighthawk in 1943 and playing over KFFA in Helena, Arkansas. He jumped bands to join Sonny Boy Williamson in the 1940s, working with them for over three years. He then worked with BB King in Memphis on WDIA. He relocated to Cairo, Illinois, working there during the early 1950. After a stint in St. Louis, he settled in Chicago in the 1960s working with various artists as a sideman, notably Muddy Waters, with whom he worked and recorded for a dozen years, touring extensively at home and abroad. He has recorded as a sideman for dozens of artists and on his own for the Sun label, for whom he cut Pinetops Boogie in 1950. He’s a walking encyclopedia of blues history from its Mississippi roots to worldwide tours. This interview took place in Vienna, Virginia, March 12, 1994.
“I got started in music by putting a piece of wire upside the house down in Mississippi and playing it with a coke flavor bottle. Took me an old wire off of a broom and stretched it up there. I could play ‘Rolling and Tumbling’ better than the boy that actually did it. And from that in later years I picked up me a little old guitar, they called it a Stella. Started playing on that. It looked like I didn’t know I was going to be a musician, but people always come get me for to play parties and things. I said: ‘Well, look here – I’m gone now.’
But every time I’d go somewhere you know to play on my little guitar, you know, where a piano was, it would drown me out. I couldn’t hear the little old thing. Shoot. I looked at my hands and said, ‘Look here. I got eight fingers and two thumbs. I ought to be able to play that thing too. And I went to work on piano then. Yes, sir. Just by ear. I don’t read nothing.
The first place I tried to learn to play piano was in the barrelhouse. Folks would run me off the piano: ‘Boy, get off of that thing.’ But after a while, they’d quiet down. I’d get right back on it again. And that’s the way I learned, in the barrelhouse out in Belzoni. I played ‘Special Rider Blues,’ oh, man, it’s been so long ago. I played a right smart of stuff. I could sing – sing like a bird.
My mother liked it that I became a musician. They didn’t cold water me about it, you know. I had to make a living some kind of how, instead of plowing those mules, which is what I first started doing down there. Yeah, I would sing out in the fields. That’s how I got that voicing, plowing those mules and singing.
Yeah, the biggest of the blues come out of Mississippi and Alabama and places like that. You know the thing about it, blues is something or other, just like you’re worried about something or another. You can’t get it off of your mind. You got the blues even if you can’t sing them.
I started playing piano – when was it? In 1931, let’s see, and I was born way back there in 1913. See, I’m an old man. I’m about two or three years older than black pepper. So, yeah, I was playing parties when I was real young with guitar. I didn’t know I was gonna play no music. It’s a gift. It’s a gift from the God or somebody else. I didn’t know I was gonna play, but people had me playing at parties, said, ‘Oh, man, I’m getting on the ball now’ – going to play at parties and getting paid. But a couple of dollars a night.
House parties were like when people would take their beds down out the house and people come in there and have them a nice time. I was playing guitar then. Yeah, they’d be dancing.
I broke one house down. That was in Greenwood, Mississippi. Man, I was sitting up there playing the piano. After a while the house just ‘boom,’ man, that piano started down towards me and I went around it. The people got out of there some kind of how. Didn’t nobody get hurt. But, see, I was sitting at the piano and it started rolling down there on me. Boom, and I jumped around the side of it. Let it went on down the hill. Yeah, in Greenwood, Mississippi. I never will forget it, way back there in the 1930s.
The first I worked with, me and a boy made up a band around Tutwiler, Mississippi. We call him Lee Kizant. Me and his son. His son was a guitar player and he was a guitar player and a piano player. And I was the same thing. So we made us a band around there and we played a long time around Tutwiler and them places. So, after a while, I was playing out at a place in Vance, Mississippi, on the county line. A boy come through there, they called him Robert Nighthawk. That’s the first famous band I played with. And so later I come on in Chicago, in 1951, I helped him make a record. But back then on I went back to Helena, Arkansas, with him on KFFA. So we started advertising the band, you know, the different places where we were going. So Mr. Max Moore, the Interstate Grocery man, heard me over there playing and he liked the way I played. And he told Sonny Boy Williamson to come over there and get me. He’d pay me on the air. So I had to give Robert two weeks’ notice. I said, ‘Hey, boy, I got to go where the money is.’
So I started playing with Sonny Boy. Robert didn’t like it, but I wasn’t making no money over there. We were just advertising the band. You know, ‘We’re playing at so and so.’ So I went on over there with Sonny Boy and used to get on the air everyday except Sundays. Just the rest of the week. Yeah, it looked like everybody liked the way we played. We would come on the air everyday at 12:15 and everybody said they’d go up to the house and turn their radios on and listen at me and Sonny Boy and them. And so we used to play in different towns. We were in Mississippi more than we were in Arkansas up and down the roads together.
I stayed with him about three years or better. And he took off and left us there. Wasn’t nobody there but me and James ‘Peck’ Curtis and Joe Willie Wilkins, and Houston Stackhouse. We kept the program going a pretty good while, but I didn’t like it after Sonny left.
Okay, so after a while I took and left and went to Memphis and started playing with BB King and WDIA in Memphis advertising Lucky Strike cigarettes. Yeah BB King, he’d come on air, man, ‘Be happy. Go Lucky.’ Boy, people said we sounded like a full band, just the two of us.
And after I got through with that I come on in to Cairo, Illinois and run up on Robert again. We played a little while around there. I don’t know what Robert did – something or other – but he went out of town and left me. So I had to build me up another band. And I didn’t like the band, what I had, but we went along with the program for a while there. The Wade Brothers had mighty near all of Cairo. I was playing for them. A fellow called Sam Wade, Jim Wade, Ed Wade – a bunch of Wades were there. And all of them done died out now. Gone.
It was a big tavern on 18th Street. And then I played at two taverns, three. I used to play at the 29th Street Tavern, and a hotel. I forget the name of the hotel, but it’s tore down now. But they had all that stuff and I was playing different places around there.
My first wife was Sonny Boy’s first cousin, and we stayed together for about four or five years. I brought her to Cairo, but she didn’t like it there. She wanted to leave and go back home. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll give you a ticket.’ So I got her a ticket and she went back down there with her sister and then she taken sick and died down there. Yeah, she died.
I played with a whole lot of cats. Bobby Blue Bland sung in my band when I was in Cairo, Illinois before he made any records. He was trying to get it together. And I’m the man that put Ike Turner in the music field. You ain’t heard that before. I learned Ike Turner how to play.
Well, I was working out there on a place out there from Clarksdale and Ike Turner was going to school in Clarksdale. And he heard me play. He always wanted to play like me. And every time I’d get some time, you know, I’d go out to his house and teach him some stuff on a piano, him and Ernest Lane. Me and Ike used to have some fun together. Yeah. But he worked me to death at the old piano at his house trying to learn him how to play but he got it though. When he learned then when he got up after he learned to play piano he started to playing guitar. A little boy learned him to play guitar. We called him Willie Kizant, Little Willie Kizant learned him how to play guitar. His first wife, Bonnie, she learned him how to read music. She couldn’t learn me how. I was too blockheaded. (Laughs.) See, but I got big ears, see, and I know what to do with it without reading it. Yup. So, what happened when I first started playing piano, why I was doubling, you know. I would play guitar for a while, then I would play the piano but then in later years I went over in Helena, Arkansas, and one of those bad ladies got hold to it and stabbed me in the arm and I couldn’t play it no more then. I could pound down, but I couldn’t chord that guitar.
I would call it a freak accident. I was back in a café, we call it ‘Dreamland Café,’ me and the boys was back there, you know, we played ball back there drinking beer and a little whiskey once in a while. A lady come back there and went to the bathroom. So after she went in to the bathroom, I just shut the door behind her, you know, to keep people from looking at her. So her used-to-be husband come on in and put two or three barrels of ashes up against the door and she couldn’t get out for round about an hour, an hour and a half. I’m the last somebody who she see shut the door. When they did let her out, I was standing up in front up down there and she just came down there and lit in me with a knife, and went to cut me to pieces, and cut the muscle out my arm and that’s the reason I can’t play guitar now.
Well, anyway, after she found out that I wasn’t the one that put those ashes and stuff against the door, her and her mother paid my doctor bills and gave me everything I wanted to eat, brang me fruit every day, stuff like that. That hurt them so bad they cried, man, but that still didn’t get my arm back right. I didn’t press no charges on them at the police station. So that’s the reason I can’t play guitar now. That’s the way it happened, what I call a freak accident. All these muscles were cut.
So I played one armed for a pretty good while. People say: ‘Hey, you play better with one arm than you did two.’ Yeah, I had the arm in a sling.
I learned how to play piano by listening at to records, listening to records and listening to other people play. Nobody taught me. One cat, they taught me to chord and how to sing behind the piano and so I asked him, ‘What is a chord?’ He showed me. I was doing it, but the thing about it, I was making the piano sound like you sing. If you say something out I would play the melody like you sing it. And that’s the way, that was something different. People liked that. So that’s the way I learned how to play.
I learned Pinetops Boogie-woogie from Pinetop Smith. He was the first man that made a boogie woogie. And so I was the second boogie man behind him. I made that on Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. Me and Earl Hooker was together. That was Johnny come later around 1950, I think. But Pinetop Smith made that way back in the 1920s when I was little. Real young. So I liked the sound, so I did it. I reckon that’s when all of them they started calling me Pinetop Perkins.
I didn’t change when I went to Chicago until I started changing myself. For instance, when I first started playing piano I was playing in E flat and A flat and stuff like that. Well, after I started playing with different guitar players, they pull me down to E natural, C natural, and stuff like that. So that’s what changed my style around because I used to play in E flat and B flat, where horns play. Saxophones and stuff like that. But they pulled me out of those keys. I’m still out of them. I’m playing in C, A, and D. I can play in them keys all right, but I used to couldn’t play in them. I had to learn all over again when I was with Muddy Waters.
I was with Muddy, I had to play in C or G, and I had to learn all over again. But I had stayed with it so long it comes natural to me now. Them other keys like A flat or B flat, I don’t play in that no more.
I’d rather play in a group than play solo, because then you have to do everything by yourself. I get more money now because then when I was playing by myself I’d get $2 a night and all the whiskey I could drink. And get drunk and go home and go to sleep.
I used to listen to Pinetop Smith, Little Brother Montgomery, Roosevelt Sykes, and all them cats. Those were my idols. And my jazz man, that was Count Bassie. I loved the Count. Yeah, we traveled overseas together when I was traveling with Muddy Waters. Count Basie tickled me though. One time we were in Nice, France, over there, he told me, told Muddy Waters, say, ‘Man, I can’t see how you play a nine bar blues and make it come out right. Now, you supposed to play eight beats to the bar, so how do you play a nine bar blues and make it come out right?’ Muddy told him, ‘You go to the devil.’ Yes, sir, we had some fun over there. Count Basie, Father Hines, and all of us.
People tell me, ‘Oh, no, don’t you retire.’ I say, yeah, I want to leave it up to you all, because I’m getting too old. A man gets to be 76 years old, he’s got to get out of it, find some place to sit down. That’s what I’m gonna do – relax for a few days. Yeah, I’m on tour with them now. Though when we get through with this tour I’ll sort of slow the playing a little bit. Of course, I got to go back down to Texas to a few little places, Antoine’s, stuff like that.”
Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene.