Blues Keeps On Losing Its Last Representatives, One After Another... Even Magic Slim Is Dead!...

Magic Slim, the Mississippi native blues guitarist and singer who died early Thursday in Philadelphia at age 75, for decades was a standard - bearer for Chicago blues.

Magic Slim died Thursday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said manager Marty Salzman. Slim had been scheduled to play a show in Harrisburg in early February when he was stricken with bleeding ulcers. He was first treated at a hospital in Pottstown, then transferred to Jefferson two weeks ago for surgery. He also suffered from lung, heart, and kidney disease, and "it all turned out to be too much for him," Salzman said.

The bluesman (August 7, 1937 – February 21, 2013) was born in Torrence, Mississippi. He was still very young when he lost his little finger in a cotton gin mishap so he was forced to give up playing the piano. He moved first to nearby Grenada. He first came to Chicago in 1955 with his friend Magic Sam. The elder Magic (Sam) let the younger Magic (Slim) play bass with his band.

The great Chicago blues star Magic Sam (born as Sam Maghett) was Slim's mentor. "Magic Sam had told me don’t try to play like him, don’t try to play like nobody" he once recalled. "Get a sound of your own." So, it was Magic Sam who gave a teenager named Morris Holt the stage name Magic Slim when the two performed together in Chicago in the 1950s.

At first Slim was not rated very highly by his peers. He returned to Mississippi to work and got his younger brother Nick interested in playing bass. By 1965 he was back in Chicago and in 1970 Nick joined him in his group, the Teardrops. They played in the dim, smoke filled juke joints popular in Chicago in the 1970s on bandstands barely large enough to hold the band... the rest of this short tribute in the next post...

Boogie wasn't Magic Slim's personal style (as it was for the great John Lee Hooker) but in that case he did his best! So, in the following audio we listen him in a wonderful song which has the title "I Wanna Boogie"...