Winning a Grammy at 97 broke a record long held by comedian George Burns, but Joe Willie Perkins did it playing some of the most physically demanding music there is. Born in 1913 on a plantation in Belzoni, Mississippi, with only a third-grade education, Pinetop Perkins started out as a guitarist until a 1940s knife fight with a chorus girl in a Helena, Arkansas, cafe severed the tendons in his left arm. It should have ended his career. Instead he pivoted to the piano, an instrument that relies on the weight of the arm rather than the pinch of the fingers, and rebuilt his reputation on Robert Nighthawk's KFFA program and Sonny Boy Williamson's King Biscuit Time.

This episode follows Perkins to Sam Phillips's Sun Studio, where his flawless cover of Pinetop Smith's 1928 Pinetop's Boogie Woogie gave him a nickname and a lifelong misconception  ...