Blues piano master Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins was born on July 7, 1913, on the Honey Island Plantation, seven miles southeast of Belzoni. He spent much of his career accompanying blues icons such as Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 and Muddy Waters, then after he began touring and recording as a featured singer and soloist in the 1980s, he earned a devoted following as a venerated elder statesman of blues piano. Although he did not have an album under his own name in the United States until he was seventy-five years old in 1988, during the next two decades he recorded more than fifteen LPs and CDs. Perkins started on guitar, learned piano as a youngster from local players and from records by Clarence “Pine Top” Smith and others, and was among the many pianists influenced by Smith’s 1929 “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie.” Much of his childhood was spent moving around the Delta with his mother, other relatives, or his friend Boyd Gilmore’s family, while he picked cotton, worked as a handyman, mechanic, and truck driver, and played at juke joints, house parties, and cockfights. His first professional music job was as a guitarist with Robert Nighthawk. In the 1940s he played piano on radio broadcasts with Nighthawk and Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, and after a woman stabbed him there, the injury forced him to give up guitar as he was becoming better known as a pianist. He also drove a tractor on the Hopson plantation near Clarksdale, later mentored a young Ike Turner on piano there, and began working with Earl Hooker. Perkins first recorded as a pianist on a Robert Nighthawk session in Chicago in 1950, and in 1953 he recorded two versions of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” with Boyd Gilmore and Earl Hooker for Sam Phillips’s Sun label in Memphis. He continued playing with Nighthawk, Hooker, and others while also working at a laundry and a garage. In 1969, after Otis Spann left Muddy Waters’s band, Waters called on Perkins to take his place, and international touring and recording with Muddy brought him widespread recognition. He made his first album in 1976 for a French label, left Muddy in 1980 with other band members to form the Legendary Blues Band, and after recording two albums with that group, embarked on his belated solo career. Other blues artists born in or near Belzoni or who lived there included Denise LaSalle, Boyd Gilmore, Eddie Burns, Paul “Wine” Jones, Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, and Elmore James.
