Jerry Portnoy can still remember moment Muddy Waters hired him to play harmonica. It was April, 1974, just days after an impromptu performance together at Chicago’s On Broadway club during a memorial for fellow bluesman Johnny Young. “You play that s*** right, boy!” Waters exclaimed after the Tuesday night gig. By Friday, Portnoy got a call letting him know to be ready for the next gig in Indianapolis.
Shellshocked as he hung up the phone, the only thing Portnoy could think to do was run down the stairs of his Rogers Park apartment building and burst through the doors of Round Records to share the news with the shop owner, his friend Ed Mooney.
The story is just one of the incredible passages in Portnoy’s gripping new memoir, “Dancing With Muddy: Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and My Lucky Life in and Out of the Blues” (Chicago Review Press), a great way to usher in the Chicago Blues Festival this weekend, which is also showcasing a 75th anniversary of Chess Records, the local home base for Waters.
“When I tell that story, I get choked up, even to this day,” says Portnoy on a Zoom call from his home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
As Portnoy talks, it’s hard not to notice the walls behind him that are adorned with a lifelike painting of his harp mentor Big Walter Horton and a lively photo of Portnoy with Louis Meyers, Calvin “Fuzz” Jones, Pinetop Perkins and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, the backbone of the Legendary Blues Band. Having their spirits lingering in his “man cave” set the tone as Portnoy holed up in the very spot during the pandemic to write his book.
Across the book’s 259 detailed pages, a patchwork of life in 20th century America, including old Chicago, is revealed, and always with music in the background.
Now 82, Portnoy is entrancing as he talks about growing up in Albany Park, raised by Jewish immigrant parents, and experiencing the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Space Age and the Civil Rights movement.
He talks of being drafted into the Army, enrolling in jump school and declaring himself a conscientious objector. He runs through the odd jobs upon coming home, such as managing Howard-Paulina Billiards and working at the Cook County Jail at 26th and California before milling about Chicago’s West- and South Side blues clubs. It’s where, he says in the book, “white guys who could really play were still something of a novelty.”
It all led to friendships with fellow harps players Rick Estrin and Paul Oscher and an illustrious career, holding gigs in the house band at Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge, the Muddy Waters Blues Band (“still the best band of all time,” he says), the Legendary Blues Band, the Streamliners and the Eric Clapton Band, collectively performing in every U.S. state and on six continents.
“It seems like it happened to somebody else,” Portnoy shares. “I mean, when I look at my own résumé, I’ve said, that can’t be true.”
And it all started down on Chicago’s Maxwell Street where Portnoy astutely begins his book.
It was the storied gathering spot known as the “Ellis Island of the Midwest,” but also “the crucible where [Chicago blues] was forged,” Portnoy says. Mississippi Delta musicians who came to Chicago during the Great Migration often set up in the open-air weekend market, hoping for tips in their hats.
Portnoy’s father ran “Max Portnoy & Sons, King of Carpets,” and he’d bring along five-year-old Jerry, whose job it was to get coffee and corned beef sandwiches from Lyon’s Deli, right where Little Walter liked to set up and play.
Little Jerry was hooked.
“I remember riding home [from Maxwell Street] in a cab with my mother on a late Sunday afternoon and the sounds of the blues, the intervals, they were still going through my head,” says Portnoy.
When he later stumbled upon the landmark “The Blues of Sonny Boy Williamson” record in his 20s, it hit him all over again like a ton of bricks. Soon enough, he was getting lessons for his harmonica (picked up off a friend’s mantelpiece) from Big Walter Horton and Sonny Terry. “I became obsessed,” Portnoy says.
Looking back across the span of his career, it never abated. “It was a wonderful time. It was the greatest gift of my life to be around all that. … It’s why I subtitle the book ‘my lucky life,’” he shares.
Ultimately, the musician says “I wanted to take people along with me on my ride. There’s a certain sense of wonder that I still feel going through it.”