In this mem­oir, Jer­ry Port­noy paints a dis­tinct, col­or­ful pic­ture of how he came to be a blues musi­cian. Born in Chica­go in 1943 to immi­grant Jew­ish par­ents, Port­noy grew up in the melt­ing-pot neigh­bor­hood of Maxwell Street; his father’s car­pet store stood near an authen­tic Jew­ish deli across from a street cor­ner where south­ern Black immi­grants were craft­ing the icon­ic sound of elec­tric blues by string­ing pow­er cords from apart­ment win­dows to their ampli­fiers on the side­walks. These child­hood and fam­i­ly mem­o­ries are the only Jew­ish ele­ments of Portnoy’s life. As he says when he meets with the Black own­er of the his­toric Nate’s Del­i­catessen, ​“He and I had, in a cer­tain sense, mir­ror-image back­grounds. I was Jew­ish, trained in a Black envi­ron­ment. He was Black, trained in a Jew­ish one.”

Port­noy was a gift­ed learn­er and loved to read, but he was averse to school­work. While bum­ming around Europe and North Africa, he bought an album by blues har­mon­i­ca play­er Son­ny Boy Williamson. The sound of that album defined his future. He returned to the US and learned to play har­mon­i­ca by mak­ing friends with the great­est prac­ti­tion­ers of the art, and he began sit­ting in with great bands. He immersed him­self in the world of Black Chica­go, say­ing, ​“The Black world was earth­i­er and more vibrant, freer and more exu­ber­ant. Peo­ple walked and talked with style, dressed with col­or, and laughed with gus­to. There was a warmth and spon­tane­ity that I respond­ed to. The white world seemed uptight — stodgy and con­strained by contrast.”

Jerry’s future career was estab­lished when Mud­dy Waters, the icon­ic king of Chica­go blues, invit­ed him to join his band. Tour­ing with Mud­dy turned Port­noy into a har­mon­i­ca blues mas­ter who could lead his own bands, make record­ings, and even­tu­al­ly, be invit­ed to tour with Eric Clap­ton. The con­trast between the gen­er­ous pay and com­fort­able set­tings that Jer­ry enjoyed with Clap­ton and the low-lev­el com­pen­sa­tion and work­ing con­di­tions he endured in Mud­dy Waters’s band is a sad illus­tra­tion of the effect of com­mer­cial­iza­tion and racism on essen­tial Amer­i­can music.

Port­noy is a skilled, engag­ing writer and his book is a per­son­al jour­ney through post­war Amer­i­ca, filled with anec­dotes, per­son­al­i­ties, and exam­i­na­tions of twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na — base­ball, pool, army ser­vice, hip­pie cul­ture, and the brief, shin­ing moment when Amer­i­cans lis­tened to the blues.