JERRY PORTNOY - DANCING WITH MUDDY: MUDDY WATERS, ERIC CLAPTON, AND MY LUCKY LIFE IN AND OUT OF THE BLUES - PAPERBACK - BOOK

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. After dropping out of college, he became immersed in the colorful world of pool hustlers like Cornbread Red, and Minnesota Fats as he managed the largest pool hall in Chicago. During a stint as a paratrooper early in the Vietnam war, he applied for discharge as a conscientious objector, and lived in San Francisco during 1967’s "summer of love.” While bumming around Europe the following year, 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 at Cook County Jail 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 Al