Grammy-winning blues pianist who played with Muddy Waters for 11 years
The blues pianist and singer Pinetop Perkins, who has died aged 97, was not only one of the oldest musicians in the blues community, but also still an active one, playing regularly in clubs around his home in Austin, Texas. In February he received a Grammy for the best traditional blues album of 2010 – the oldest person ever to receive the award. Pinetop's CV was formidable. Over some seven decades, he had played with Sonny Boy Williamson II, Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker and many other contemporaries, before serving for 11 years as the pianist in Muddy Waters's band. Latterly, he had played in groups made up of blues veterans.
He was born in Belzoni, Mississippi, and grew up on the Honey Island plantation. In his teens, he began to play the guitar and piano, learning the basics from a piano tuner and by listening to records. In his 20s, based in towns such as Indianola, Tutwiler and Clarksdale, he played at house parties and clubs, but then, in the early 1940s, he was wounded in the left arm by a woman who attacked him with a knife, and had to give up the guitar: "I couldn't chord like I used to, so I stuck to the piano."
He played with Williamson on Interstate Grocery's King Biscuit Time, a blues radio show on station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, and with the young Ike Turner, whom he claimed to have taught to play the piano. He made his first recording in 1950, in Chicago, for the Aristocrat label (the forerunner of Chess), accompanying Nighthawk. His first recording under his own name – done for Sun in 1953, while he was touring with Hooker, but not released until many years later – was a personalised version of Pinetop's Boogie Woogie, a tune introduced by the pianist Pine Top Smith in 1928 which Perkins took as his own signature piece.
After spells of living and sporadically playing music in the cities of Cairo and East St Louis, both in Illinois, he moved in the early 60s to Chicago, where he worked for several years as a mechanic. He rejoined Hooker and made an album with him in 1968, but soon afterwards the guitarist's career was halted by tuberculosis, and in 1969 Pinetop accepted a job offer from Muddy.
Now he had the unenviable job of succeeding the superb and much-loved Otis Spann, but his less flashy abilities suited the band well enough. He was, in the words of the French critic Jacques Périn, "a robust, straightforward musician, a disciple of all the solid pianists schooled in the rough training-grounds of the barrelhouses".
With Muddy, he played at all the major blues festivals, visited Europe several times and participated in albums for Chess and Blue Sky, but it was not full-time work, and he often had to take non-musical jobs. In 1980 he and Muddy had a dispute about pay and, when the leader would not increase his wages, Pinetop left, taking most of the group with him. For a few years they worked as the Legendary Blues Band.
Blues record labels were keen to have so popular and experienced a figure in their catalogues. Since the mid-70s Pinetop had recorded at least 20 albums for more than a dozen labels, usually with Chicago-style bands, sometimes in live performance, occasionally as far from home as Paris or Reykjavik. The price of this productivity was a number of recordings marred by overused material – he could hardly be dissuaded from playing How Long Blues, Look On Yonder Wall and his eponymous boogie woogie at every session – or by unimaginative backing musicians, and latterly by his own declining powers. But at his best, as on the thoughtfully produced Sweet Black Angel (Verve, 1998), Pinetop could make very satisfying albums.
His last, Joined at the Hip (2010), a reunion with another Muddy Waters alumnus, the drummer Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, was the Grammy winner – actually his second, for he had been one of the Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen troupe whose album had won the award in 2008. He had also received a lifetime achievement award at the Grammy ceremony in 2005. He made albums with the guitarist Hubert Sumlin (Legends, 1998), with Odetta, Ruth Brown and other female singers (Ladies Man, 2004), and, on Pinetop Perkins and Friends (2008), with a clutch of admirers including Eric Clapton, Jimmie Vaughan and BB King. A documentary about his life, Born in the Honey: The Pinetop Perkins Story, was released in 2007.
In 2000 he received a national heritage fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in February this year the Mississippi Governor's lifetime achievement award. He won the Blues Foundation's blues music award for the best piano player so often that he eventually retired from the competition, whereupon the prize became the Pinetop Perkins piano player of the year award.
His partner Sara Lewis predeceased him in 1995.
• Joe Willie (Pinetop) Perkins, blues musician, born 7 July 1913; died 21 March 2011