Ladies and gentlemen, we want to bring you out
one of the baddest, guitar players
that ever did it and got away with it.
The incredible Mr. Hubert Sumlin.
The one, the only,
Mr. Pine...
top... Perkins.
One of the greatest drummers of all time,
- Willie "Big Eyes" Smith. - Whoo!
When you're talking about electric blues, Hubert Sumlin's
contribution to Wolf's music...
...can't separate those great records
from Hubert's playing.
He was the guitar player on
"I Ain't Superstitious."
Willie Smith, he's the engine, you know? He's the groove.
How do you explain when someone
adds every time you sit down to play?
Pinetop's playing was really identifiable.
Everybody from Eric Clapton to the Rolling Stones,
Led Zeppelin, rock bands all over the place
that have made some of the most legendary records
in the history of music,
all of these guys were influenced by them
to one degree or another.
It's the ABCs of rock, baby.
That Howlin' Wolf sound, you know,
Hubert and Howlin' Wolf and that band
really changed a lot of people.
All the slow, fast and medium-tempo blues,
rock and roll just kind of took that
and they had the gold, and everybody kind of tried
to make a little gold from their gold
because it was perfect, you know?
Hendrix was very influenced by Hubert Sumlin.
His sound and his looseness on the guitar.
It was fascinating being on the road with, uh,
with Clapton realizing how,
how hard he dug into that stuff when he was kid and...
All of the early stuff I heard,
Howlin' Wolf band and Muddy Waters' band
and Howlin' Wolf's band, it was Hubert Sumlin.
And so he became
a hero of mine in his style.
He's a fantastic player.
Pinetop's the ability to, to play like that
and not step on the vocal
and not step on the guitar player and not overdo it,
but not underdo it, is just incredible.
It takes incredible talent to be able to do that
and there's not a lot of players that can do that
the way Pinetop did.
I watch his hands move.
I mean, he's from the old, old, old school.
It seemed like every nook was just gold.
Every nook meant so much.
I think that's one of the things
we inherited from the blues.
You just play ahead. You're playing for yourself,
but you're also there to entertain the audience
and the show must go on.
Not that bad.
Imagine growing up on a plantation going,
"My choices are...
this life,
or I have this harmonica, or this guitar or an idea,
and I can entertain people,
and maybe if I take a chance and move to Chicago,
I get discovered, I can get myself out of this life."
As World War I erupted,
millions of Southern, black men and women
seeking to escape the oppressive conditions
of the Jim Crow South would take their chances
and head to Northern, industrial cities
like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
As immigrants from the Delta Region,
they carried with them a rich culture,
a culture that included American roots music
or what we know today as the blues.
Two Delta musicians who decided
to take their chances on Chicago
were Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.
At times friends, at times bitter rivals,
these men would ultimately go on to establish themselves
as the two titans of the blues.
Over the course of their long careers,
Muddy and Wolf would employ dozens of side musicians.
Of these sidemen, Howlin' Wolf guitarist, Hubert Sumlin.
Muddy Waters' piano player, Pinetop Perkins.
Muddy Waters' drummer, Willie "Big Eyes" Smith.
Each of these men would have a unique relationship
and play a pivotal role
in the legacy of their respected, band leaders.
And collectively, these three sidemen
would go on to help redefine popular music as we know it.
But to fully understand the remarkable lives
of these three men,
one must first understand the life of a sideman.
It's the same story 1,000 times.
There's the guy and then there's everybody else.
Unfortunately, they always,
they always kind of get brushed aside when,
- I mean, there's no doubt, you take... - Willie.
Yeah, Hubert or any of those guys out of that,
and it's an entirely different beast.
It's not, it's not nearly the same.
When your name isn't on the publishing, right...
you're, you're, ain't getting any checks.
And when you're not the lead singer,
you know your name on the marquee
isn't really going to draw that many people.
Well, Hubert wasn't an artist like B.B. King
or Freddy King or Albert King
in the way that he wasn't front and center singing and playing.
He was normally a sideman
and he was adding his presence and his personality
to the music and to those amazing records.
The true role of,
uh, a second, a, a hired, second gun,
you don't want it to overpower the guy.
Without the sideman, no music, you know?
Without that riff on "Killing Floor," no "Killing Floor."
You don't hear a lot of, uh...
Hubert's solos the way you would hear, like,
Albert King solos and stuff like that.
What you hear is the atmosphere that he created.
He plugs in and starts playing guitar,
and this is what happens automatically.
He was just, like, always in the background,
quiet and calm, but,
when he came out on stage
to do his thing, it was amazing.
I know from my own music but from all the music I love,
it's never just a matter of whose name
is on the front of the record,
or who the singer is, or even the writer.
It's always a collaborative effort
with the band members, you know?
It's hard to say whether Willie showed up
at the studio at Chess and gave Muddy the arrangement
the way he came up with it, but,
I like to think that after years
of opening for the Muddy Waters Band
and all the years when I went on
and they were... We collaborated when shows,
when they opened for me later in colleges,
the musicianship and the chemistry
between Willie and Pinetop was just phenomenal.
I mean, there's no way to separate the contribution
of each member of that.
There was just a feel.
Levon Helm's summed up
the difficult life of a sideman
with his direct, plainspoken style.
"The very term itself, sideman,
it's just a God damn putdown.
Hell, everyone knows who Muddy Waters is.
Everyone knows who Howlin' Wolf is and they should.
But, damn, not enough people know who Hubert Sumlin is.
Not enough people know who Pinetop Perkins is.
The players, they don't even get a dance book.
Hell, they don't even get to go to the dance.
Muddy and Wolf get fucked while there, at the dance,
while the rest of us just have to hear about it."
Blues is the music of survivors.
It's not those who died in, on the path and got lynched.
It's those who survived.
They got to sing the blues.
Those songs were meant so that a man could go out in the field
and he could chop all day long.
And he's chopping and you hear a song like a...
Woke up this morning.
I was... Feeling around for my shoes. Well?
The blues came along during the times of separate,
but unequal, if you want to be truthful about that,
segregation in its worst,
more harsh forms.
It developed from a struggle.
They had the blues for real, you know?
Field working, the Ku Klux Klan.
Just being black and living in America was rough.
It gave, it gave everybody black the blues.
Pine and Hubert both knew,
if you stepped out of line,
you either got beaten or killed.
And you didn't step out of line
in Mississippi in 1920s and '30s
if you were an African American man.
You didn't look at a white woman.
You didn't do a lot of things,
and they knew they had to get on
that highway and get out of there.
Get 55, go through St. Louis, and end up in Chicago.
And that's where everybody was headed
in order to have some respect.
When did you start playing?
How old were you when you started playing piano?
Not playing for the money,
just playing, just learning how to play, how old were you?
Around about 13, 14 years old.
Yeah.
Born July 7th, 1913
on the Honey Island Plantation in Belzoni, Mississippi,
Pinetop Perkins was born into a sharecropper's existence.
By age seven, Pinetop's parents had split up
and his mother took him to live with his grandmother.
A woman Pinetop described as,
"A mean, Black Creek Indian
who would get mad at you just for looking at her."
Pine would find out the hard way
that disobeying Grandma
literally meant taking his life in his own hands.
As Pine's passion for music grew,
he began to resent the backbreaking,
field labor and strict existence
of life living under Grandma's roof.
This all came to a head one day
when Pine failed to obey Grandma's instructions
regarding the cutting of stove wood
for the family shack.
Infuriated, she grabbed a glass, cork bottle
and smashed him across the head with it.
The bottle shattered knocking Pinetop out cold.
When he came to, he found Grandma beating him
with one of those sticks of stove wood.
Pinetop had had enough.
Later recounting the incident, he said,
"I woke up, man, and I left there running.
I hauled rump away from there.
I left them and I went out on my own."
Pinetop was 16 years old.
By this time, Pinetop had become a skillful musician
and was finding steady work playing gambling houses,
juke joints, fish fries and brothels.
In 1943, Pinetop would get his big break
when he was asked to join Sonny Boy Williamson
and the King Biscuit Entertainers
on the popular King Biscuit Time radio show.
In the decades to follow,
Pinetop would work countless, odd jobs
to support himself as a musician.
He did everything from driving a tractor,
running a gambling house, making moonshine
and teaching Ike Turner how to play the piano.
He would go on to record and tour
with the likes of Bobby Blueblan,
Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker
and legendary Sun Records Producer, Sam Phillips.
At a 1969 gig in Upstate New York,
Muddy Waters would ask Pinetop to join his band.
We had a gig in Buffalo, New York
at the Governor's Tavern
and Pine was an opening act for Muddy Waters.
Pinetop's relationship with Muddy was of two people
that had shared very similar experiences
whereas some of the other band members hadn't,
grown up on a plantation.
Muddy and Pine hit it off right away.
Muddy used to call Pine "Old man,"
and I, I don't know who was older though.
On the piano, the Old Man.
Pinetop Perkins.
Muddy called, "Come on over here, Old Man,
and let's play some cards."
And they'd play casino.
I used to get a kick out of watching them play casino
because, because they put the card out.
"Ha! I'm going to, I'm going to get you.
I'm going to get you, Old Man."
Pinetop would go on to occupy
the piano chair in Muddy's band for over a decade.
Pine would appear on more than half a dozen albums
and play a significant role in the revitalization
of Muddy's career that would unfold throughout the '70s.
Without the blues, there would be no rock and roll.
I mean, there's all that there is to it.
There wouldn't be any rock and roll
if it wasn't for those guys.
I mean, they've had a huge influence. Like Muddy did that song,
"The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll."
That was, just about right.
I mean, there definitely wouldn't be rock and roll
if it wasn't for the blues.
We wouldn't have any rock and roll
if it wasn't for Chess Records.
Any rock and roll.
Chess had Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.
So they are the architects of rock and roll.
I know they're in the blues genre.
But that, that is the very beating heart of rock and roll,
is, is the, the blues music of the South and Chicago.
The music that those guys created,
it built this bridge from blues to rock
because it was too dirty and nasty and angular
to just be Delta blues and traditional blues.
But people had not quite taken it all the way
to like Jimi Hendrix at that time.
So this was the missing link.
This was that area where the music
kind of had its own categorization.
It was like nothing else anybody else was doing.
By the late '50s, British teens
unaffected by issues of politics and race
were fascinated by the mysterious nature
and undeniable authenticity of American blues.
I mean, there's this exotic thing about finding records
from the Deep South and, you know,
these, I mean, there's a whole collection.
- These guys... - The mystery...
Yeah, the mystery of it all. I mean, there's,
you don't know if these guys are alive or dead.
And you don't, you don't know if these stories are mythical or true.
In Britain, they'd be, they'd... I don't know what they'd be playing.
There'd certainly be no Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin
or Beatles without those records.
In 1964, the Rolling Stones,
still a fledgling band,
decided against management's advice
to record an American blues song as their next single.
The Stones insisted on recording Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster"
featuring Hubert Sumlin's signature, guitar riff.
The Rolling Stones.
Let's see if we can actually spin it back around
and give them the blues
and make American, white kids
listen to "Little Red Rooster"
and then go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"You had it all the time, pal,
you know, you just didn't listen."
We actually said, "This is a Howlin' Wolf's song
or this is a Muddy Waters' song."
So the kids got to know this
and then they went out searching for the records.
It was really the British guys that brought it around,
you know, to the Americans and then, uh, um,
turned on guys like me and, uh, to go back and, and dig.
British bands at that time, they sort of, um...
you know, took it in,
they sort of made it their own thing,
and they put it right back in our face.
Like, "Hey, Americans, look what you have
and you're not even aware of it."
"Little Red Rooster" would reach number one in England
and to this day remains the only blues song
ever to hit that mark.
The Stones made no bones
about whose songs they were playing.
Then the next generation, were these bands
were, like, really playing blues.
The Allman Brothers...
we don't play
a whole lot of real intricate stuff.
Basis of it, the groove of it is, is...
spawned from the blues.
No matter where else it may go,
it's going to come back to...
I mean, it's all just drenched in the blues.
Those guys, those are the guys that performed all the,
all the songs that are so dear to my heart, you know?
We started doing the Beacon and guests
started showing up and I was like,
"You know what? If we're going to have people out,
let's have people out."
Like, "Let's have people that started this band.
Let's have people that Duane Allman would want to have out."
It was like sitting down, playing with your grandpa.
Hubert was one of the first names that come to mind.
So, when those guys got back to us, it was like,
"Hu would love to come out."
You know, Me and Warren, we were, we were pumped.
"No shit? Hubert's coming out?"
The one and only legendary Hubert Sumlin on the guitar.
When you hear Hubert tell stories, he's talking about,
"You know, I was with Etta backstage in 1955..."
And you realize he's talking about The Apollo
with James Brown and Etta James
and he's hitting on Etta in 1955
and all this stuff's going on.
He doesn't realize how incredibly cool it is.
He was, he was a fantastic guy and a great storyteller too
because he had all these stories about being on the road.
And he would always do that thing where he'd incorporate
your name in the story, and then he's like,
"And then, Derek, you know what Wolf said to me?"
And I was like, "What, Hubert? What?"
He's one of those guys that had a knack,
that when you talk to him, of making you feel
like the most important guy in the world.
Pinetop...
he, wow, what a resilient guy.
Chain smoked cigarettes.
And he loved women, we had lots of discussions about women.
Hey, Pinetop, what was that song you sung about big women?
Yeah!
Shaking on the bones.
Just... just warmhearted.
Just easygoing, whatever, whatever, you know?
Yeah, as long as they got some McDonald.
He loved McDonald's.
Two double cheeseburgers, two apple pies and Sprite,
which is five dollars on the dollar menu and shares for two meals.
That's what he ate every day.
He didn't even care that I was some long-haired,
young, white kid who probably should have been,
you know, in a Pearl Jam cover band.
These guys were my fricking Pearl Jam.
They were my musical heroes
and they just treated me like any other cat.
Mostly we just talked about other stuff, you know?
Like fishing and women and what they like to drink.
Willie was another one of those guys that called me son.
And, you know, we took him out on the road with us as well
and we had a, a tremendous amount of fun.
And we talked about a lot of things, uh, personal.
I mean, he's got a lot of kids
and I've met many of his children.
He and I were friends and discussed, uh,
my experience becoming a father
and starting, you know, beginning my own family
and raising children and stuff.
But I'm from Tulsa, Oklahoma
and in 1960
I went to Chicago to get into the blues,
and the first band I ever saw in my life
had these guys in it.
Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Otis Spann
and, guess who was playing drums in that band?
Willie Smith.
If you want to go back, let's go all the way back.
Ever since I can remember, I always wanted to play.
Willie Smith was born January 19th, 1936
just across the mighty Mississippi
from Pinetop and Hubert in Helena, Arkansas.
Growing up amidst all the great music of the South,
Willie inherited his mother's love of music
and passion for the blues at an early age.
However, a burning desire to play an instrument
was hampered by a lack of money.
Undeterred, Willie picked up the harmonica,
the most affordable and portable instrument
available to him at the time.
Like so many Southern, black men and women,
Willie's mother would join the great migration North
and head to Chicago.
Leaving Willie behind with his grandmother,
she hoped to find a better job and build a better life
for her and her young son.
Throughout his youth, Willie formed many bands
and was developing a serious love of the blues.
Never missing a chance to check out the new music
playing on all the juke boxes,
Willie became particularly fond of Muddy Waters,
the man who was redefining the music
with his new, Chicago style, electrified blues.
At age 17, Willie was called to join his mother in Chicago.
Taking the Illinois Central North,
he didn't get off until he arrived
at Chicago Central Station.
It wouldn't be long before his mom would take him to meet his idol, Muddy Waters.
And within a few years,
Willie would find himself occupying the drum chair
in Muddy's band.
A position he would fill off and on
for the next four decades.
And he was a great, blues player. I mean, I think people kind of overlooked that
a little bit because they're so enamored
of his sound and his tone,
just this aura of Jimi Hendrix.
Arriving in England in the fall of 1966,
Jimi Hendrix, a big fan of Hubert's guitar playing
and in particular his lick on the song, "Killing Floor,"
would use that song to stun the who's who
of the British Rock scene.
Jimi would then take his talent to a much larger stage,
one populated by none other than his idols,
Hubert Sumlin and Howlin' Wolf.
Thank you.
Hendrix was in the crowd and, and he came up and,
you know, he was just, went straight for the stage.
Wolf... the band was playing
and he came on the stage and played with the band.
If you look at Jimi Hendrix choosing to play "Killing Floor,"
he's the guy that redefined electric guitar playing.
To have been influenced then by Hubert Sumlin, that says a lot.
Hubert was a big influence on Jimi Hendrix.
Basically, if you take him,
you take that style and you put it through
a big amplifier and turn it up,
you've got Hendrix.
When you listen to a lot of those Wolf records,
Hubert's contribution to that music
was so important because
it helped create something
that transcended where blues had been at that point.
It led us to rock and roll.
That's such a heavy contribution,
it can't be overlooked.
I always found myself wondering
does he know how heavy he is?
Did he know how heavy he was?
I don't know, he was such a lighthearted,
fun-loving character
that I never got the, the sense that he was even aware
of how much he had contributed.
The blues for him was life.
Life.
And it made him happy.
And he could play the devil out of it.
Hubert Sumlin was born to a loving mother
and strict, sharecropping father
in Greenwood, Mississippi on November 16th, 1931.
His big brother ignited Hubert's passion for music
after fashioning a makeshift guitar
known as a diddley bow,
by nailing a piece of bailing wire
to the side of the family shack.
Using a Coke bottle as a slide,
he made a sound that Hubert found irresistible.
Hubert's mother, recognizing her son's passion,
would spend an entire week's salary
to buy Hubert his first real guitar.
This would mark the start
of a lifelong, love affair with the instrument.
The next time a Coke bottle would figure so prominently
into young Hubert's life,
it would have equally significant
and long-lasting consequences.
In the ensuing years,
Howlin' Wolf would keep tabs on the brash, young man
who had literally fallen out of the sky
onto his head and into his life.
In 1954, Wolf would call down South
and ask Hubert to join him in Chicago.
His arrival would mark the beginning of an extraordinary
father son-like relationship
that would last for the next quarter century.
During that time, Hubert and Wolf
would form one of the greatest, musical partnerships
in the history of Western music.
The relationship between Hubert and Wolf,
was really the relationship between a father and a son.
Hubert thought of Wolf as his father.
Wolf thought of him as, as his son.
Howlin' Wolf's voice and Hubert Sumlin's guitar playing went hand-in-hand.
And you almost couldn't really hear one without the other.
The combination of Hubert Sumlin and Howlin' Wolf
was like that was why they were brought into this world.
For that.
Don't care what they were doing before or who they had with.
It's just when you see a hand that fit in the glove perfect,
that's what you use to catch everything with.
Hubert is a smart, guitar player.
And he don't ever, he didn't ever pretend he knew so much.
He would use the world like, "I tried."
And when he said that...
"300 Pounds of Joy" to me
is the greatest guitar solo I've ever heard.
That guitar solo, when I want to show people
what I love about Wolf,
not only is it his singing,
but it's Hubert's playing, and that solo does it.
The timing of the solo on "300 Hundred Pounds of Joy,"
which I can sing to you verbatim,
and I've been at parties, you know, high and sober
and played it and made people sit, "Shh-shh-shh."
The way he swings inside the beat
and delays and does, it's so much poetry.
I mean, I'm sure that he wasn't sitting around
thinking about it, it's just the way that he played.
Of all these guys, he was the legit rock star.
People knew about Pinetop and Willie.
People revered in the rock world of Hubert Sumlin.
- Willie? - Look at that.
Look at that!
To rank him in 100 top guitar players,
he's got to at least be in the top five
if not the top three.
I mean, for his influence and his imprint
that he left on everybody.
I was really happy to see Hubert
on that list when it first came out.
- It's like there was some justice. - Exactly.
It wasn't correct where he was put.
But it was the fact that he was on there.
- Yep. - Made me feel good.
All these kids that, that play guitar now, you know,
even if they don't know it,
they've stolen something from Hubert Sumlin.
Yeah!
It blows my mind that Hubert Sumlin's not
in the rock and roll Hall of Fame.
You can hear Hubert Sumlin
in every modern, lead guitar player today.
I mean, he is as important as Chuck Berry in that respect.
For him to not get that due is mind-blowing.
As the 1970s dawned, the demand and appreciation
for the blues had begun to fade.
However, like so many times in the past,
the music would ultimately prevail,
helped in a large part by several key events
that not only kept the blues alive,
but also helped it thrive.
These would include the Johnny Winter produced.
Muddy Waters album Hard Again and Chess Records,
The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions.
Pinetop, Willie and Hubert
would each play integral parts in these important events.
Let's show you how to do it. You know now.
Now you and Hubert take it.
I just started to pick up guitar
and at that point I was listening to...
Clapton, and Hendrix, and Johnny Winter.
And my brother said,
"Hey, check out this Howlin' Wolf record.
Eric Clapton's playing on it."
And it was the London Session records.
So like a lot of people my age,
my first encounter with Wolf
was the London Sessions.
When Wolf went over to do the London Sessions,
uh, in England and they flew him over there,
generally what they did with people
is they would bring, like, Muddy Waters or whatever.
And, and then they would match them up
with a bunch of English musicians.
But Wolf brought Hubert with him.
He insisted that Hubert be there, you know,
because he was such an integral part of his sound.
Tell me about the London Howlin' Wolf Sessions.
Those sessions, I think it's incalculable
because you've got, if you bring together,
almost at the peak of their powers, uh,
you have these British musicians.
Uh, and, and now the,
they're slowly becoming the elder statesmen of blues,
uh, people like Howlin' Wolf
uh, and almost passing the torch to a degree.
Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts showed up.
And, you know, every musician in London was there.
Mick Jagger was in the studio.
Howlin' Wolf was very resistant to playing with these guys.
In London, Wolf was completely out of his element.
He, was uncomfortable out of his element.
Eric came up to me after the first day and said,
"Do you think I should even come back tomorrow, you know,
I mean, Wolf just grabbed me
and seems he doesn't like us."
And I said, "No, no, no, come, you can come back tomorrow.
It'll be fine."
So the next day I saw Eric, I said,
"Look, why don't you ask him
to show you the changes
on slide guitar for 'Little Red Rooster?"'
And, of course, Eric knew it in his sleep.
But he got the idea.
And so you can hear on the record him saying,
"Hey, Wolf, you know, would you show us how,
you know, the slide part goes on 'Little Red Rooster?'
We really can't do it without you, man.
We want you to play it with us."
So Wolf reaches down to his cardboard,
guitar case and pulls out his old, Sears Silvertone Guitar
and he starts playing this humongous,
unbelievable, slide sound.
And you can hear on the record if you listen to it,
you know, how he's teaching them the song.
And at that moment, I think Wolf melted.
Let's show you how to do it. You know now.
Now you and Hubert take it. Now you play it that way.
You sure you wouldn't like, why don't you play acoustic on it?
- No. - With us, man.
See if you'll play with us, Wolf,
then we'll be able to follow you better.
Like, like you were doing it right then, man.
- You there. - - That's how we should record it
and I can follow you,
I can see what you're doing.
Really, just sit here and do it.
Listen, everybody get together there
and we'll try to make it.
Okay, let's try.
I don't know if I can do it
- without you. - Oh, man.
Come on, he's just, you ain't got nothing to do
but count if off and, and, um,
and, uh, change on the, and you know, when you said.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four, you change.
- Alright. - That's it.
- Yeah, that's it. - That's it.
That's it, that's it.
Hard Again sonically is one of the best albums
ever recorded in the blues genre.
It's just one of the great,
greatest, blues albums of all time.
That record comes on
and it is just fat and compressed.
That first tune hits you
and it's just like, that groove is just bam.
That's the most powerful blues riff ever played.
Everybody knows that riff, everybody.
The Muddy Waters Band that I always wanted to be a part of,
it had Pinetop, it had Willie "Big Eyes" Smith,
it had Bob Margolin, Johnny Winter,
Muddy Waters, all these guys.
Once Chess folded and he went to G.R.T,
they didn't really know what to do with him.
They made some pretty bad records.
I just wanted to get him back to where I knew
he always wanted to be.
Johnny wanted to capture the essence and the passion
of that whole band
being in the room together
and, you know, capture, like I said capturing
that lightning in a bottle, and, and he did.
It was a lot of fun. We did everything real quick.
One or two takes.
Everybody knew what they were doing.
It's all seasoned, blues guys.
So it was a very easy record to make. It was just a lot of fun.
Johnny the boss man now.
We going to hear something.
Johnny wanted to turn Muddy back
into the Muddy that he knew and listened to.
So that was his main thing, that's how he produced that.
It was all live.
He tried to do it one take as much as possible.
Willie's drums were captured
in the most powerful light ever.
Pinetop's playing is just weaving in and out
of every song throughout the entire record
and he plays all these great parts just at the right time.
Johnny is of course in the band.
They're, they're playing live
and he couldn't control himself behind the console,
like, screaming and shouting.
Just getting off so much on the music.
I think that kind of says it all.
Hard Again really kind of helped revive Muddy's career
and I run into a lot of people who are,
all about 50 years old now who say,
"That's what got me into blues right there. Through Johnny Winter."
Which is exactly what Johnny was deliberately
trying to do and he did that.
Yeah. That were some fun years, man.
Great music.
No money but look at all the fun
you was having, that's what life is all about.
Three and a half decades after it's released,
"The Blues Brothers" is considered a timeless classic
and continues to entertain fans around the world.
When Danny and I wrote the movie,
it, it was important that we have artists
on Maxwell Street in Chicago.
And then we said, "Well, great,
here's an opportunity to get some great artists."
And so we approached Muddy Waters
and he was very enthusiastic.
And that's why Pinetop, that's why those guys are there,
because it's his backup guys.
The plan was for John Lee Hooker to sing a song
and for Muddy to sing a song.
Uh, the day that came to shoot Maxwell Street,
Muddy was sick, he got the flu.
So we went ahead without Muddy
and that's why John Lee is by himself there
backed up by those guys.
These guys were greatly appreciated,
but not by a mass audience,
which basically means they were opening acts and,
and not being booked that much.
So Danny and John did an extraordinary thing,
they exploited their own celebrity
to focus attention
on these amazing, American acts.
Although Pinetop and Willie appear in the film
playing a part in yet another significant, cultural moment,
most viewers never even noticed they were there.
Just another day in the life of a sideman.
When Wolf was schedule to play in Europe, couldn't make it.
And Hubert, I guess it's like you could just say,
was a, you know, in his stead.
There's a story that's almost mythological
around Wolf wanting to tell Hubert something.
What was it that he wanted to tell him? I don't know.
I think we can only speculate about what it was.
I think he wanted to tell him, "I see you as a son."
And I think he, he felt that connection
with, with Hubert, and not to get that,
not to get that payoff if you will,
um, I think it, uh,
it's just one of the many things that I think haunted Hubert throughout his life.
By 1983, both Howlin' Wolf
and Muddy Waters had died.
Their passing would mark the end
of two of the most influential careers in music history
and serve as a reminder that with or without the blues,
music was moving on.
Disco, new wave and arena rock were now the reigning kings.
And although these forms owed a great debt to the blues,
not many seemed to care.
It was into this inhospitable environment
that Hubert, Pinetop and Willie were cast
forcing them to reinvent themselves and their careers,
whether they were ready for it or not.
Wolf's death just absolutely devastated Hubert.
If you didn't really have a father figure
or didn't particularly respect your father figure,
and then this musician came in and taught you the ropes,
loved you, maybe perhaps hated you at times.
But just showed you everything about life,
the good, the bad, all, all these things.
If that goes, I mean, your support system goes.
Your foundation goes.
And I think that that's what he needed.
I think that Hubert needed that foundation
to give him a direction.
I think without him, I think he was truly lost.
Hubert lost Howlin' Wolf.
He got divorced.
He lost his house.
So he had nothing.
He had no family, no friends,
no band and, um, he was too famous
to be a sideman and too shy to be a leader.
So he's in a real tough spot.
It's his attitude towards his own life and his career
and people's perception of him as well, I think that hurt him as well.
That just saw him as another guitar player if you will.
Popular music has just had, moved on.
If you're looking at working, blues musicians,
I think really you got to look at the '70s
through the '80s, you know, life was tough.
It's very sad that as Hubert peaked,
Howlin' Wolf faded.
And, and, you know, those lost years,
those great, that was when he was great, you know?
Howlin' Wolf left and Hubert was there
with all of that talent.
Hubert was probably 24/7 drunk or as much as he could be.
I'm sure he was doing blow.
I mean, he was releasing or performing so rarely,
I don't think people even realized who he was at the time.
I think he had fallen so far into the hole that he was gone.
Pinetop Perkins was living in a low-income
housing neighborhood in Chicago with part of his family.
Most of the time that we would send money to him,
it would get stolen before it would get to him.
Because he would call us back and tell us
that this was happening.
And he was also being physically abused,
and, uh, just a lot of horrible stuff going on.
He had been arrested for drinking and driving
once at least, and he was put into jail
and he was on work release for a while.
I don't think people realized because Pine was still playing,
and he was still getting to gigs.
He wasn't doing well, he was drinking and looking bad
on stage and stuff, but he was getting there.
Couldn't believe nobody else wanted these guys.
That just blew my mind that they were sitting in poverty
and getting beat up and treated like garbage
and nobody cared.
I mean, the moment they called me,
I was like, "Yes."
Throughout the '90s and into the new millennium,
a blues resurgence would push the music
to the forefront of popular culture.
Blues music would once again
serve as a prime source of inspiration
for a whole new generation of artists.
'78 to '90, that was a period of bad, bad, bad music.
When that period died,
I think the people were ready to hear good music.
So it was really good timing for all of us
because when they were ready to come back,
people were ready to hear them.
But it wasn't only musicians
that were drawn to the blues.
When Madison Avenue needed just the right sound
to suggest raw passion and gritty sexuality,
the song "Smokestack Lightning" featuring Hubert's iconic,
guitar riff and Howlin' Wolf's primordial wail
helped to sell a whole new form of inspiration.
So why would you let something
like erectile dysfunction get in your way?
Isn't it time you talked to your doctor about Viagra?
This renewed appreciation
for genuine, American roots music
brought with it a renewed interest
in the few remaining, authentic blues musicians.
We'll just stay for a couple hours
if you don't want to stay through the whole thing, okay?
- All right. - I think you'll be fine.
Let me see, let me look at you.
All right.
Look, look up.
- Hey, boy. - Hey, boy, how are you doing?
Alright.
We get to the red carpet unless we get lost.
...L.A. live.
For best, traditional, blues album,
the nominees are James Cotton, Cyndi Lauper,
Charlie Musselwhite, Pinetop Perkins
and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith.
- Yeah! - Jimmie Vaughan.
And the Grammy goes to Joined At The Hip,
Pinetop Perkins and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith.
I think I was more impatient than he was.
So when they did call his name to, to come up,
he still was sitting there
and I'm jumping all over the place,
jumping up and down, jumping up saying,
"You won, you won."
And finally I shook him,
I said, "You won."
Whoo! Whoo! Thank you, thank you.
First of all...
...I'm a little nervous now, I had so much to say when I got up here
and I'm a little bit emotional, I'm so glad,
I didn't ever thought my heart would be this full.
But I'm, uh, I want to give,
first of all, all the thanks go out to God Almighty.
That's who did this.
That's were the first thanks go to.
The next thanks go to my wife,
that stood up with me, stood behind me
through all these triumphs and fails, we're here.
To win it with one of his greatest friends
and one of the greatest, top musicians.
So that made it even more important to him.
Thanks to all of the people
that had something to do with this.
I'm a little emotion... Thank you.
At this point, it must have had,
I hadn't, just to put it in perspective,
about 53 years.
First one.
Well, what can I say?
It's better late than never.
That's five decades, man.
That's a half of a century that he put into it
and, to finally...
get the recognition, I guess.
And it was more of a...
I hate to use the word, more of, uh...
a relief.
Like, "Yes, now the world finally knows
what you've been through, they know your story."
Being able to play in the '70s and '80s,
you have very few folks
who make it that far
and who can stay in the music business.
Legendary bluesman and Austin resident.
Pinetop Perkins has died.
Tributes for legendary, blues pianist,
Pinetop Perkins, following his death.
He's being fondly remembered as one of the last,
great, Mississippi bluesman.
Just last month, Joe Willie Perkins,
nicknamed Pinetop, became the oldest, Grammy winner ever.
March 2011 to March 2012
was the biggest transition my life will ever have.
The last time I saw Pinetop, he was holding a Grammy
at the Grammy Awards.
It was, like, perfect.
He always talked to me about that trophy,
and the trophy was the Grammy.
He got his trophy,
went back to Austin a hero.
Went to bed and died.
I mean, at 97, that's not a bad way to go.
He's one of the nicest, most wonderful people
that you would ever meet in your entire life.
He's the kind of guy that I want to be, you know?
Both musically and personally.
He, he was just a,
an extraordinary example of a human being.
When I feel sad, I, I try to think about Willie's laugh.
I think about some of the silly things that he did
and that push the sadness away.
In 2011, Pinetop, Hubert and Willie
all passed away within eight months of each other.
I was still coping with the Pine thing,
and then Dad passed.
I tried to block that out.
Then Hubert passed,
which was literally just a couple months after Willie.
It was just like a domino effect, man.
It was just like, oh, man, can I buy a break.
Those three guys, man.
It was a reason, a lesson and a story
behind their passing, man.
That's just, that's just how I had to keep
thinking and believing.
Still searching for those answers, you know?
They're going to let me know one day.
One day.
I woke up with the blues and keeping the blues alive.
You know, so that's it, that's all we can do,
is try to keep the blues alive.
As long as you can do that, they'll never die.
You got to think about the younger generations, you know?
That's what, that's, that's what all those changes come from.
If, if it were left up to you and me,
things would never change.
When I play music,
it's like nothing else matters.
It's, it's...
it's like an escape from reality for a second,
you know, when you're solo,
and you're, like, in the moment.
It's just you,
and your guitar and your music,
and that's all that matters.
I never met Pinetop or Hubert or Willie
but just listening to those guys,
you almost feel like you meet them,
through listening to them and,
and listening to their playing.
You almost get that connection through their playing and,
I, I really don't know what the blues world
or the music world, in general,
would be without those guys.
They were the sons of the blues,
and they were the fathers of rock and roll.
That chord is what keeps coolest.
It was Pinetop's vision to perpetuate the music
to carry on the tradition of the blues
in that location right there in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Part of Pinetop's vision was he wanted to keep
musicians like himself alive
playing music in, into the future.
It displays the music
as a viable means to make a livelihood.
I can't imagine my life without the blues
and the guitar and, I would be, I'd be just a normal kid.
I'd be that kid, you know, that would want to stay in the house
and play video games all day.
That kid that just really don't have nothing going for themselves.
Um, I was in my dad's truck one day
and he put on the blues station and I liked it. So... I started learning it.
Some of them are the next
generation, they're going to be
the ones that you hear, you'll hear their names.
No doubt about it.
Yeah.
And I would like to be remembered for who I am.
To me, a musician, you know? Not, not good and not bad.
I don't want to be remembered for, "Oh, he was great."
Or "He was this." No, I just want to be remembered for who I am.
Plain, old, Willie Smith.
You got it.