Carnival of Soul

For the four years before his death in 2013, Slim, whose name was Morris Holt, played his Christmas show with the band led by his son, Shawn “Lil’ Slim” Holt.

“I guess he was grooming me to take over,” said Holt, who’ll continue the family tradition at the Zoo on Wednesday night.

While he played with his dad many times, the Christmas shows were special for father and son.

“I would look over at my dad at Christmas, and he would be crying,” Holt said. “Nobody else would see it, but he would cry. He was a man of very few emotional words, but toward the end, he let me know how he felt about playing with him, especially when he gave me his life.”

In early 2013, Magic Slim, then 75, had been given only a short time to live by doctors, but he decided to hit the road with his band, The Teardrops, which included Shawn on guitar, for what was supposed to be a long tour.

“The last tour, he told my mom, ‘Ann, I’m not going to make it back here,’” Holt said. “My mother said, ‘Why are you going, Slim? Stay here.” My father looked at my mom and said, “I’m doing this for Shawn. I’ve got to get him out there.’ We were doing a Johnny Winter tour, and he knew Johnny would love me. He literally died out there for me. He died alone in a Philadelphia hospital, just to get me out there.”

Get him out there, Slim did.

In 2014, Shawn Holt won the Blues Music Award for best new artist debut, a trophy to share the shelf with Blues Hall of Famer Magic Slim’s six Blues Music Awards. And Shawn continues to lead the Chicago-based Teardrops while living in Lincoln.

The Holt family Zoo Bar tradition stems from the late ’80s, said Zoo owner Pete Watters. One year, a bartender who had nothing to do on the holiday opened the Zoo on a Christmas night with no band. “There were no bars open on Christmas back then,” Watters said. The Zoo got a good crowd that Christmas night, so it scheduled a show for the next year.

“I remember in the very, very beginning, Lucky Peterson doing it two or three times,” Watters said. “When Magic Slim started doing it, that was it. The last 20-25 years of his life, he did Christmas.”

The first Magic Slim Christmas shows came when he moved his family from Chicago to Lincoln to get his son, then a teenager, away from the gangs that were ravaging their neighborhood. And those shows soon became a family gathering of a different sort.

“We have a lot of people who don’t live in Lincoln who would spend the day with their family, then they’d all come down to see Magic Slim,” Watters said. “Now it’s happening with Shawn.”

Wednesday will be Holt’s first Zoo Bar appearance since last year’s Christmas show.

“I’m touring, touring, being out of the country,” he said. “It’s been kind of a long year — Canada, Europe — and the beginning of next year, we’re back in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. They’ve got me going all over.”

Holt is thankful for some downtime over the holidays.

“I used to never be in Lincoln on Thanksgiving,” he said. “I’d be working in Europe, eating baloney sandwiches on Thanksgiving. It worked out I could be in Lincoln this year. I got to have Thanksgiving dinner with my family for the first time in five or six years.”

Now he’s looking forward to spending Christmas Day with family, and Christmas night with family.

“It feels good to be part of a very strong tradition,” Holt said. “The music scene here is like a family.”

To that end, Holt’s put together a band for Wednesday that includes guitarist Levi William, who played with The Teardrops, drummer Jom Van Gelder and, on bass, Jeff Boehmer, the son of original Zoo Bar owner Larry Boehmer.

Wednesday’s repertoire won’t be Christmas songs. It’ll be traditional Chicago blues, with a Holt spin.

“Everywhere we go, people say, ‘Play some Magic Slim,’” Holt said. “With Jeff playing bass, of course we’re going to play some Magic Slim. We’ve got to pay homage to the man.

“Other nights, I can play my stuff. The Christmas show, that’s Magic Slim’s.”