BLUES AFTERNOON: Jerry Portnoy talks life & music with Gregory Williams

Join us at Thacher Hall for A Blues Afternoon, where Judge Gregory Williams will interview legendary harmonica player, Jerry Portnoy, and explore the history of blues along the way. This multi-media program will feature photos, videos, and music and conclude with a book sale and signing.

Jerry Portnoy is a Grammy nominee and the ONLY musician to have played in the fabled bands of both Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton. He grew up in the crucible of electric blues: Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street Market in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. He 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 hall 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 riveting 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.

Gregory Williams was a Massachusetts trial-court justice for 15 years, including serving ten years as First Justice of Edgartown District Court. Before taking the bench, he was an Assistant Attorney General, lastly Deputy Chief of the Western Massachusetts Division, and before that, a lawyer in private practice. He holds degrees from: Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) (B.A., English); Queen Mary College, University of London (M.A., English [20th-century British Literature]), and Washington and Lee University School of Law (J.D.). He speaks on such topics as Massachusetts historical crimes, notable Cape Cod figures, and the romantic-macabre.