As a young man, Jerry Portnoy certainly didn’t expect or plan to have a career as a blues harmonica player.
He’d already been on a roulette wheel of life paths: failed college student, airplane-jumping soldier, medical assistant, sometimes pot dealer and pool hall manager.
But two unexpected events help to set it all in order. The first was at the age of 24 when he picked up a harmonica off a friend’s mantlepiece, which he then brought with him on a wandering tour of Europe. And the other was hearing the harp-filled album The Blues of Sonny Boy Williamson.
Now at the age of 81, he’s looking back on a lengthy, storied career. One that would find him sharing stages and studios for years with one master and a high-ranking student of the genre, in Dancing with Muddy: Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and My Lucky Life in and Out of the Blues (288 pp., $19.99, Chicago Review Press).
“Probably the best bumper sticker I ever saw said ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,’” Portnoy says via Zoom from his home on Cape Cod.
“I think that applies to anybody’s life. Anything can change depending on what road you go down. Picking up that harmonica from the mantle, that was a fortunate accident, but it seemed almost cosmic in its intent. I didn’t have a plan. I just stumbled through the fog. And it turned out pretty well!”
The book opens with Portnoy growing up in the Maxwell Street area of Chicago in the 1940s and ‘50s. A bustling area where working-class Blacks, Jews, and Italians all mixed together. And Portnoy puts the reader right in the middle of the bustling avenue with its hawkers, vendors, storefronts and live music—usually blues—performed live in the street.
“It may be the most vivid writing in the book because it was the most vivid place,” Portnoy says. “And I had the blues embedded in me as a child there.”
After he returned to the U.S. from that European jaunt, Portnoy says he became “obsessed” with playing the blues and learning everything he could about the music. He—like fellow young white players including guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Steve Miller and harmonicist Paul Butterfield—would go to Black clubs in parts of town that whites didn’t normally traverse. They all hoped to sit in on a set with blues masters like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter or John Lee Hooker.
“To achieve skill at anything, you have to be sort of monomaniacal about it. And I was,” Portnoy offers. And he remembers how welcoming that Black clubs were to young players—so long as you could actually cut it.
“When I started, white guys who could play blues was something of a novelty, so you did have sort of an advantage. Black women would sit there and [shout out] ‘Listen to that white boy play!’” he laughs. “If you could play, you were cool. I never had any problems inside of the clubs. As I write in the book, the danger was outside on the streets.”
Portnoy spent nearly six years in Muddy Waters’ band, though the daily grind and salaries were not what most people might expect. Band members were required to pay for their own hotel rooms, even on off days when there was no gig.
Portnoy details how he and the rest of the band would make modest requests to Waters’ manager and go-to business guy, Scott Cameron, about money and aspects of life on the road. But whatever gains were hard fought and given begrudgingly (Waters himself, however he felt about it, usually deferred to Cameron’s judgment).
Shockingly after one such tussle, Portnoy and the entire band quit together. And despite the fact that they built themselves into one hot unit, Cameron didn’t budge. Waters ended up having to break in an entire new unit while Portnoy and the rest started their own career as the Legendary Blues Band (the moniker was not them being boastful—it’s how they were introduced on stage with Waters at the start of each gig).
Portnoy says the details of the band’s leaving in his book will be “somewhat of a revelation in the blues world.”
But when gigs dried up and record didn’t sell either from the band or his next fronting the Streamliners, Portnoy was struggling to survive. That is, until he got a call from God himself: Eric Clapton (or so London graffiti of the ’60 dubbed him).
Clapton had made a tradition of long residencies at the UK’s Royal Albert Hall, and he tapped Portnoy to be part of the “blues nights” that were part of the 1991 run. Clapton was so enamored of his harp player that he included him in several other Hall runs through the years, as well as many concert tours and the recording of his all-blues record, 1994’s smash hit From the Cradle, along with other live and studio efforts.
Suddenly, Portnoy’s bank account grew flush, and the no-expense-spared efforts Clapton’s management offered on the road made traveling a hell of a lot easier. Plus, the crowds could number in the tens of thousands. A far cry from some nights where he played in Waters band early on to a dozen or so people in a dingy Chicago club.
Surprisingly, Portnoy says that Waters and Clapton had many similarities in terms of how they ran their bands.
“Both of them were pretty much laissez-faire bandleaders. They hired you because they thought you could do the job. And they wouldn’t say anything unless you were doing something they didn’t want or they had a suggestion about how they wanted you to play something,” he recalls.
Portnoy says the one time Waters was very enthusiastic about his playing was at a club in Philadelphia. At the time, this particular venue had a dressing room TV with an audio and video hookup showing what was going on onstage.
“We did a couple of songs ourselves at the end of the show, and when we went back to the dressing room, Muddy jumped up and said ‘The way you played! I’ve never heard anything like that!’ And that was a big compliment!”
Dancing with Muddy also details Portnoy’s long-lasting friendships with a couple of other harmonica players who are also singers: Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Rick Estrin of the Nightcats (which he now fronts after the years-ago retirement of the band’s previous namesake, guitarist Little Charlie Baty).
“I go back with Kim over 50 years, and Rick even longer,” Portnoy offers. “Those friendships are so satisfying, and old friendships are the best because you have a shared history with those people.”
A picture in the book shows Portnoy and Wilson during a gig at Houston’s storied Rockefeller’s, one of several times he played there in Waters band. He even recalls at one of them Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top presented Waters with a custom-made guitar that had the legendary bluesman’s name on the fretboard.
Today, Portnoy is hoping to do a few local library and bookstore events when the book is published next month. And he hopes that the book will appeal to (as was his intention when writing it) a general reader and not just blues music diehards. He is also revamping his website and hopes to have a new edition of his “Blues Harmonica Master Class” CD lessons available for sale.
Finally, the title of Dancing with Muddy comes from something that often happened onstage. In high spirits during a show, Waters would sometimes perform what he called his “buck dance,” moving his legs up and down and shifting his weight from side to side. And when that would happen, Portnoy would then mirror the boss’ actions. Though Portnoy admits in the book that Waters was the better dancer.
“It was fun! I don’t remember the first time we did it, but the crowd really loved it. Especially when he turned to me,” Portnoy says. “Muddy was a good guy. And he gave me a life.”
For more on Jerry Portnoy, visit JerryPortnoy.com
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
