Morris Holt dreamed of playing piano until a cotton gin accident took his pinky finger. That loss forced him onto stringed instruments and, as this episode explains, mechanically shaped the slurring, sliding guitar style the world came to know as Magic Slim. Born August 7, 1937 in Torrance, Mississippi to sharecroppers, Holt moved to Chicago in 1955 alongside his friend and mentor Magic Sam, who put him on bass and gave him his stage name. But the cutting-contest culture of Chicago's blues clubs rejected his unusual phrasing, and he retreated to Mississippi for a decade.

Rather than quit, Slim taught his younger brother Nick to play bass around the gaps left by his missing finger, building a rhythm section engineered for his own sound. He returned to Chicago in 1965, formed the Teardrops by 1970 and spent the decade playing relentless, high ...