by Bill DahlHe admittedly wasnt the originator of the seminal piano piece Pinetops Boogie Woogie, but its a safe bet that more people associate it nowadays with Pinetop Perkins than with the man who devised it in the first place, Clarence Pinetop Smith. Although it seems as though hes been around Chicago forever, the Mississippi native actually got a relatively late start on his path to Windy City immortality. It was only when Muddy Waters took him on to replace Otis Spann in 1969 that Perkinss rolling mastery of the ivories began to assume outsized proportions.Perkins began his blues existence primarily as a guitarist, but a mid-40s encounter with an outraged chorus girl toting a knife at a Helena, AR, nightspot left him with severed tendons in his left arm. That dashed his guitar aspirations, but Joe Willie Perkins came back strong from the injury, concentrating solely on piano from that point on. Perkins had traveled to Helena with...