Magic Slim

Morris Holt wanted to play piano, until a cotton gin accident in the early 1950s cost him his little finger and ended that. In 1955 he followed his mentor Magic Sam to Chicago, where Sam let him play bass and gave him the nickname Magic Slim. His band, the Teardrops, became a touring fixture, and guitarist John Primer, another Mississippian, played with them for thirteen years from 1983. Slim settled in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1994, where the Zoo Bar had long booked him. He died in 2013. The marker stands on Union Street in Grenada.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 0.5 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.
• Holly Springs National Forest — 13 mi
  A patchwork national forest of about 155,000 acres in the north Mississippi hills, assembled in the 1930s from worn-out cotton fields and replanted in pine by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 21 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.

More markers nearby

• Grenada Blues — 0.6 mi
• Edward C. Walthall — 0.7 mi
• Grenada Dam — 2.9 mi
• Magic Sam — 5.2 mi