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 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 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 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. In a remarkable life, he also assisted in surgery, lodged in a Moroccan house of ill repute, and dined at Giorgio Armani's.