An Evening With Jerry Portnoy
Stories and Music from the Golden Age of Chicago Blues
A multimedia storytelling and music experience featuring live performance, rare photographs, historical video, and firsthand stories from the world of Muddy Waters, Chicago blues, and beyond.
Bio
Jerry Portnoy is the ONLY musician to have played in the bands of both Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton. His riveting new memoir, Dancing with Muddy: Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and My Lucky Life In and Out of the Blues, was published in 2025 by Chicago Review Press.
Jerry Portnoy grew up in the crucible of electric blues: Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street Market in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. He is a Grammy nominated veteran of both the fabled Muddy Waters Blues Band and the Eric Clapton Band, and has performed at the White House, Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, Radio City Music Hall, the Smithsonian, and at jazz festivals around the world in a career that has taken him to all fifty states and dozens of countries on six continents.
In a remarkable life, he also ran the largest pool room in Chicago, did a stint as a paratrooper, lived in San Francisco during 1967’s famed “Summer of Love,” assisted in surgery, worked at Cook County Jail, and dined at Giorgio Armani’s home. He is pictured on the packaging for the Marine Band harmonica: the world’s most popular musical instrument. His autobiography/memoir Dancing with Muddy: Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and My Lucky Life In and Out of the Blues was published in 2025 by Chicago Review Press.
About The Program
“Dancing with Muddy” is an informative and entertaining multi-media presentation featuring photos, videos, and music, that weaves Jerry’s unique personal story with a history of the blues, touching on some of the styles and major figures of the blues, the Great Migration, and anecdotes about Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Minnesota Fats, and other colorful characters.