Taking a stab at the Blues Roadhouse incident leads ‘Pinetop’ Perkins into musical history

But for a juke joint stabbing somewhere in the mid-1940s, Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins might be performing Friday night at the 66th National Folk Festival as the world’s greatest blues guitar player instead of the world’s greatest blues piano player. Perkins, an enduring legend at 91, will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 27, on the Railroad Stage.

As Perkins tells it over the phone from his Indiana home, He was “an innocent,” drinking whiskey in the Dreamland Cafe in Helena, Ark., when a fight broke out between an estranged couple. The man piled trash barrels in front of the ladies room, trapping his girlfriend inside for hours as she got madder and madder. When she finally got out, she pulled a knife and struck at the first man she saw, one Joe Willie Perkins.

“She laid it on me with that knife. She got me in the shoulder and the hand. The tendons were gone and I couldn’t even raise it up,” he said.

That ended his guitar career, starting a career on the keyboards, which has brought Perkins all over the world, playing with blues legends Howling Wolf, “Sonny Boy” Williamson, B.B. King and Muddy Waters, staying on the scene long enough to play piano for the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. Along the way he has earned “about 15” W.C. Handy Awards, the latest bestowed in April in Memphis, Tenn., for being the best traditional male blues artist of the year.

Rockland blues impresario Paul Benjamin was on the Handy Award stage and watched Perkins perform “for maybe the 30th or 40th time.” Perkins has performed several times in Rockland at Benjamin’s North Atlantic Blues Festival.

“Without question, Perkins is a living legend. When you think of blues you think of Charles Brown and Pinetop. Brown is gone but Pinetop can still play and sing. He puts on a phenomenal show for someone 30 years old, let alone 90,” Benjamin said,.

“There will never be another one like him,” Benjamin said.

Perkins has no intention of stopping performing any more than giving up smoking. “I have been smoking since I was nine. But I am down to a half pack a day now,” he said. His only concession to age has been to swear off whiskey. “I used to make that stuff in Mississippi until the revenue agents caught me. But I don’t fool with it no more. I am pretty healthy,” he said.

He will keep playing piano until he cannot play the piano any longer. “I don’t know what else to do to make a dollar or two. I came up the hard way,” he said.

Perkins was born in poverty so dire in Belzoni, Miss., in 1913 that he refuses to talk about it. His first instrument was the “diddly bow” which was a wire stretched between two nails driven into a barn wall. A neighbor, Scott Morris, used to make pianos out of spare parts and junk. Perkins told Offbeat Magazine of Morris: “He had all them parts, you see. He’d fix a piano and tune it. He could do anything with a piano. He could make a piano like brand new. I worked for him for a while and he carted off all those parts to me. And I made my own.”

He started playing the songs he heard on the radio on the piano, including Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake. He ended up with a guitar and started playing house parties on both instruments by the age of 10. He emulated Clarence “Pinetop” Smith so much that he inherited the nickname.

By the 1940s, he was playing the rough-and-tough jukebox circuit with Robert Nighthawk, until he was discovered by Williamson and ended up on the legendary “King Biscuit Flour Hour” in Arkansas.

Replacing another legend, piano player Otis Spann, Perkins took over the keys in the Muddy Waters band from 1969 to 1980. That was until “Muddy got himself a booking agent. He would take all the money Muddy made and there wasn’t much left for us. So, I quit.”

Perkins formed the Legendary Blues Band, which was made up of the rest of those who quit Waters’ band. “I don’t know if I am the best blues piano player. I listen to a lot of them who are as good as me. I listen to any music I can, but I can’t remember their names no more,” he said.

There will be no set list Friday night. “I don’t have a set, just as I think of them, you know? I yell out what key I’m in and we go.”

After the show, he will go back to Indiana to do some fishing. “The lake is too low for really good fishing. But I will give it a try anyway,” said Perkins, the greatest blues piano player alive.

Who would argue with “about 15” W. C. Handy Awards?

To learn more about the National Folk Festival, visit www.nationalfolkfestival.com. Emmet Meara can be reached at meara@msn.com.