Wellfleet Public Library

Dancing With Muddy

Jerry Portnoy grew up in Chicago hearing the blues being played outside his father's rug store on famed Maxwell Street during the late 1940s and early '50s. While bumming around Europe following a stiny as a paratrooper early in the Vietnam War, Portnoy heard the blues again on a record by Sonny Boy Williamson and instantly became obsessed with mastering blues harmonica. He returned to Chicago and in 1974 he was playing in small Black clubs at night when Muddy Waters plucked him from his day job to fill the historic harmonica chair in his fabled band. Eric Clapton followed suit in 1991. In a career that took him from ghetto taverns to the White House and the Royal Albert Hall, he went from the raggedy vans and cheap roadside motels of the blues world to the private jets and five- star hotels of the rock world. Between those two very different gigs was a struggle to survive the vagaries of the music business and the pressures of life on the road. Dancing with Muddy details the surprising, lively, and sometimes bumpy ride of a blues harmonica legend.

Jerry Portnoy has played on several Grammy Award-winning albums while recordingwith a wide variety of artists including Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Hubert Sumlin Bill Wyman and many others, and was a Grammy Award nominee in 1997 for his work with the Muddy Waters Tribute Band. Television credits include appearances on Saturday Night Live, Soundstage, MTV, VH1, and the Disney Channel, as well as writing and performing original music for Sesame Street. He lives on Cape Cod.