01	Pinetop Is Just Top						06:15
	02	Pinetop's Boogie Woogie						04:33
	03	Take A Little Walk With Me						04:52
	04	Rockin' The Boogie						05:17
	05	So Many Days						05:29
	06	Jackson Town Gal						04:40
	07	Sweet Black Angel						05:17
	08	Lend Me Your Love						04:47

Willie "Pinetop" Perkins - piano, vocals
Luther Johnson Jr. - guitar
Calvin Jones - bass guitar
Willie Smith - drums

Recorded on November 1st, 1976


Pinetop Perkins
Boogie Woogie King

The party in the back of the Dreamland Cafe in Helena, Arkansas was in full swing-good whiskey, ribald conversation and laughter, raucous conviviality. Willie Perkins, a local blues radio celebrity, piano player and guitarist, was among the assembled. Suddenly, a woman dashed up to him with fire in her eyes and a knife in her hand. Before Perkins had a chance to defend himself, she slashed a deep cut in his left arm, tearing his muscles and severing his tendons. She was a chorus girl who danced on a show that was touring the area and the entire episode was the result of a misunderstanding, but that was scant consolation to Perkins, who saw his career as a professional bluesman passing before his eyes as he writhed in pain.
Another man might have abandoned his dreams, but that wasn't Perkins' style. Born in Belzoni, Mississippi in 1913, he'd taken up music at a young age to escape the grueling life of a farmhand, a life of plowing behind mules from sunup to sundown for pay that barely kept him eating. He listened to records by blues giants like Robert Johnson and boogie-woogie piano pioneer Clarence "Pinetop" Smith; local musicians like John Wesley and the colorfully named "Terrible Sludge" provided further inspiration for the youngster attempting to forge a style of his own. He worked locally with pianist Willie Love in the late 30's and got a taste of the life of the itinerant bluesman when he travelled to St. Louis with the legendary and peripatetic guitarist Big Joe Williams a few years later.
He eventually left the Delta for good with guitarist Robert Nighthawk. With Nighthawk he travelled to Helena around 1943; there they broadcast their music over radio station KFFA on a program sponsored by Bright Star Flour. Harmonica master Rice Miller-Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2-soon lured Perkins to his own King Biscuit Flour program, also on KFFA; Perkins remained a member of the King Biscuit studio band for several years, while he gigged steadily around the Helena area. It was an exciting life, full of adventure for a fun-loving young man revelling in his celebrity and success in what was then a wide-open river town. Those hot Mississippi cotton fields, although just across the river to the east, must have seemed far away.
So Perkins wasn't about to abandon his blossoming musical career, even if it meant working his way painfully back from a debilitating injury. After the stabbing - which occurred in 1944 or 45, according to Perkins' recollections in the 1990 Original Chicago Blues Annual-he didn't return to guitar, but he was soon back pounding the ivories and singing the blues in a variety of settings around the Helena area. By the late 40's he'd moved on again, this time to Memphis where, he says, he joined B. B. King on a show sponsored by Lucky Strike Cigarettes. Memories are uncertain at this late date, but this might have been B. B.'s famous show on radio station WDIA, the first station in the country to feature an all-Black format.
In 1949 Perkins hooked up with Nighthawk once more; they headed north to Cairo, a community in the southern part of Illinois that had a thriving blues scene. From Cairo it was inevitable that he'd hit Chicago, the blues capital-this he did in 1950, when he entered Leonard and Phil Chess' Aristocrat studios with Nighthawk to record the classic Jackson Town Gal.
By now his piano style was in full bloom: a rolling barrelhouse boogie bassline overlaid by shimmering treble chords and lithe single-note runs, with elements of stride thrown in along with sparse, Basie-like harmonies. In the classic Delta manner, Perkins could bring equal amounts of conviction to a house-rocking anthem and a mournful slow blues. But it was primarily his indefatigable spirit-ebullient and warm, a rare fusion of optimism and steely determination to prevail-that made his music infectious and unforgettable.
That style-passionate, with an exploratory impetus that looked forward to the new urban styling as eagerly as it celebrated Southern roots-made Perkins the perfect accompanist for Earl Hooker. Hooker was an aggressive but smooth-playing guitarist who specialized in both slide and mellifluous single-note runs, and who played a major-if somewhat unheralded-role in the postwar fusion of country tradition and big-city elegance.
It was with Hooker that Perkins hit the road once more in the early 50's. They stopped off in Memphis, where they recorded classic interpretations of The Hucklebuck and Pinetop Smith's Pinetop's Boogie Woogie on the Sun label. Although the records went unreleased at the time, Perkins says that his rendition of the Smith tune during this period-probably on countless club dates, as well as in the studio-earned him the nickname "Pinetop", a name he's carried proudly to the present day.
But the blues has never been an easy way to make a living. Although Pinetop gigged with the likes of Johnny O'Neal and Little Milton in the East St. Louis area through the mid- to late -50's, he eventually settled down in Chicago and secured a day job, relegating music to an enjoyable hobby.
By the late 60's, though, the blues "revival" was in full swing. Pinetop re-emerged to cut an LP with his old compatriot Earl Hooker onArhoolie in 1968; the next year he joined the Muddy Waters band when Otis Spann, Muddy's longtime pianist, departed to form his own group with his wife Lucille. As piano man for what was arguably the most prestigious blues band in the world, Pinetop reintroduced a new generation of listeners to his eclectic style of boogie-woogie and blues keyboard mastery.
In 1980 Pinetop and the rest of the Muddy Waters Band decided it would be more profitable to step out on their own.They became the Legendary Blues Band, and until the late 80's Pinetop served as pianist and elder statesmen for this band, one of the most impressive blues aggregations ever put together. Finally in 1988 he recorded his first LP under his own name. After Hours, for the Blind Pig label.
The music on the disc you're holding in your hands was originally recorded in November of 1976.The band here is the nucleus of Muddy's band of the period, the group that would become the Legendary Blues Band a few years later: Pinetop's soulful, rollicking piano is accompanied by guitarist Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson, Calvin "Fuzz" Jones on bass, and master drummer Willie "Big Eyes" Smith. Guitarist Bob Margolin and harmonica player Jerry Portnoy, also members of Muddy's band at the time, were absent from this date.
This is vintage taste of the classic postwar blues style, served up by masters. Listen especially to Smith's in-the-pocket shuffle beat, laced with a hint of uptown swing; Jones with his sparse but propulsive basslines, weaving intricate filigrees with Smith's understated percussion work; and finally "Guitar Junior" the young gentle giant with steel-strong hands and tenderly musical fingers, as he lays down his quintessential combination of Delta-influenced Chicago elementalism and post-1960 aggression and flamboyance.And then, of course, there's the inimitable Pinetop, injecting more fun into rowdy barnburners than many pianists can put into an entire set; reprising his classic variations on boogie woogie themes; pouring his soul into the cadences of slow blues and easy-rolling ballads.
The years slip away; the sights, sounds, and smells of a vintage-era juke joint seem to be magically conjured when you hear this music. There's a dice game out back, fried fish and pig-ear sandwiches are cooking in the kitchen, shouts and laughter resonate throughout the room, the cigar and cigarette smoke is almost as thick as the music is loud. Have a swig of home brew or bottled-in-bond whiskey, grab an available lady or gentleman for a turn around the dance floor, or just sit back on your barstool and enjoy the music-and watch out for pissed-off chorus girls bearing knives.