Pinetop Perkins

Posted September 22, 2008, 9:52 am


Pinetop Perkins
Born: July 7, 1913

One the last original Delta blues musicians. Perkins played piano with the Muddy Waters band in the 1970s. A longtime sideman, Perkins released his first solo album in 1988, at 72.  Perkins started out on the guitar but took up piano full time after a dancer stabbed him in the arm "and I can't play guitar no more," he says.

After The Age Of Seventy

• At age 72 (1988),  released his first solo album
  
• At age 84 (1997),  Nominted for  a Grammy Award for Born in the Delta
• At age 87 (2000),  Nominated for a Grammy for Legends
• At age 87 (2000),  Won the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
• At age 90 (2003), Won so many consecutive Blues Foundation’s Blues Music Award for Best Piano Player that he was retired form the award which now bears his name
  
• At age 92 (2005),  Nominated for a Grammy for Ladies Man
• At age 92 (2005), Won Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual GRAMMY Awards.
• At age 94 (2007),  Won a 2007 Grammy for Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen, a recording of a 2004 concert.
  
• Has released more than a dozen albums after the age of 80
• At age 95 (2008), released album Pinetop Perkins and Friends
• Continues to perform
  

© 2006-2012. Growing Bolder Media Group. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.