Folk Festival music review: Magic Slim and the Teardrops | Chicago blues

73-year-old Chicago blues guitarist Magic Slim made his Richmond Folk Festival debut this year. Photo by Mel Kobran.

Michael Todd
Contributing Writer

73-year-old Chicago blues guitarist Magic Slim made his Richmond Folk Festival debut this year. Photo by Mel Kobran.

Rocking the Dominion Dance Pavilion Saturday night at the seventh-annual Richmond Folk Festival, blues artist Magic Slim and the Teardrops’ performance left audience members feeling anything other than blue.

“They’re very ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’” AFO student Paige Bedwell said, after some consideration, further evaluating that Slim’s was the type of music she expected to hear on a southern movie soundtrack.

Magic had all his listeners unabashedly jiving and foot-tapping wherever they could find room, be it on the dance floor, in their seats or around the edges of the tent, making it questionable how much blues was actually saturating his lyrics.

With a popular following spanning a wide spectrum of ages and personas, Magic Slim attracted a crowd that was as assorted and buoyant as his set selection.

“(You) give me the oxygen that I needed,” Slim announced to the audience at the beginning of his hour-long performance.

Hailing from rural Mississippi, Slim grew up assisting his parents with all the laborious tasks mandated of a sharecropping family.

Slim found the seed of music planted within him from a young age and cultivated it through church choir and piano lessons, later transforming his mother’s broom into his first guitar.

During the ’40s and ’50s, Slim took the giant leap north to Chicago under the mentorship of Magic Sam, from whom Slim received his performer alias. It was here that Slim’s style began its evolution into the sound it is today and what vibrated the downtown waterfront Saturday evening.

Illustrating an arguably alternative approach to his declared genre, Slim defies the idea of blues as being smooth, mellow or any other descriptor that is typically associated with his classification. Instead his notes zipped through the air in a manner some audience members found more comparable to jazz or other more energetic genus.

“They’re like a transition between rock and blues,” VCU student Charlotte Fennell said of Slim’s spiritedly expressive and effervescent performance.

Regardless of whether Magic Slim’s sound or lyrics translated into “blues,” there’s no denying his success in firing up Richmond’s Saturday evening.

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