by Jim Vertuno

(AP)—Muddy Waters was looking for a new piano player when chain-smoking journeyman Pinetop Perkins showed off his aggressive keyboarding during a jam session.

“He liked what he heard. The rest is history,” said Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, who was a drummer in Waters’ band back in 1969.

THUMBS UP—Grammy winning blues pianist Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins motions a “thumbs up” gesture during the 2009 annual Blues festival at Hopson Plantation in Clarksdale, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

By then, Perkins, an old school bluesman with the gravelly voice, for years had played the rickety bars among the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, and toured far beyond them with rock pioneer Ike Turner in the 1950s. He performed with the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson and slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk.

When he and Waters hooked up, Pinetop was in his 50s and never had recorded an album of his own but “had more energy than us younger folks did,” Smith said.

The men were employed by Labor Ready and working under contract for the Spokane Public Facilities District when they found a backpack containing the bomb about an hour before the scheduled start of the Jan. 17 parade.

They alerted police, who were able to defuse the bomb.

BOMBING SUSPECT ARRESTED—Kevin William Harpham, who has ties to a White supremacist organization, was arrested March 9, on charges that he left a bomb along a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade route in Spokane, Wash. (AP Photo/KXLY 4 News)

by Cristian Salazar

NEW YORK (AP)—President Barack Obama found out years ago he had an Irish ancestor who fled the potato famine in 1850. He can now claim 28 living relatives who also descended from that Irishman, including a Vietnam veteran, a school nurse and a displeased Arizona Republican.

OBAMA’S COUSIN—Dorma Lee Reese poses for a picture at her home in Tucson, Ariz., March 16. Reese, 83, a retired EEG technologist, learned about a year ago that she is a third cousin to President Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

The president’s newly identified relatives are revealed in a study released to The Associated Press by Ancestry.com, whose genealogists also traced descendants of 23 other Irish passengers on the ship that brought Falmouth Kearney to the United States when he was 19.

The survey allowed genealogists to further trace branches in Obama’s family tree and others who arrived on the ship, known as the Marmion, on March 20, 1850.

(NNPA)—The NAACP has been criticized for not including Black newspapers in a recent advertising campaign.

The NAACP inserted its 42nd NAACP Image Awards Magazine in the Philadelphia Daily News, however the advertisement was not included in The Philadelphia Tribune and other markets (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Chicago).

OUTSTANDING PICTURE—Tyler Perry accepts the award for outstanding motion picture for the movie "For Colored Girls," from Angela Bassett at the 42nd NAACP Image Awards on March 4, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)