Perkins won a Grammy, the music world's top award, for best traditional blues album for "Joined at the Hip: Pinetop Perkins & Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith." He also won a 2007 Grammy and a 2005 lifetime achievement Grammy.

Perkins was born in 1913 on a cotton plantation near Belzoni, Mississippi, and became a sideman to blues legends such as Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. Never learning to read - a shortcoming he once said cost him throughout his long career - Perkins picked cotton and was introduced to whiskey as a boy by his mother.

He ran away from home after his grandmother smashed a bottle over his head for not chopping firewood. The lanky Perkins began playing guitar at house parties and ramshackle "juke joints" in the South, and taught himself to play piano.