Nine Decades

I met him when he was just a young bluesman of ninety years - a slow moving, slow talking, on the frail side old black man with a flirtatious grin. He turned to fire when he sat down at the piano, the years melted away and you could imagine him as a young man, on stage with Muddy Waters with a lifetime of blues and music ahead of him. He'd no formal training, couldn't read the first note of music - but to his kind of musician, it doesn't much matter - if the music is in your soul, it travels directly to your fingers.

I heard him play live just twice - once on stage in Helena, Arkansas and once a day or two later in a grimy, dusty, and cluttered bar/grill/store in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Listening to him pound the old piano and watching his twisted and scarred hands travel over the keys was mesmerizing and magical - it was the kind of music I'd give my right arm to be able to play, just once, and he'd been at it for nine decades. Later, I found him on the back porch in an decrepit old lawn chair, nodding off in the warm sunshine and looking dapper and elegant. He agreed to let me take his picture and blew me a kiss afterward. Don't rightly know why you'd want a picture of these here old bones, he told me, but ya'll is sho nuff welcome to it.

The good Lord takes a whole lot of care with gifts He gives - Pinetop played another seven years.

Pinetop Perkins
1913 -2004