Magic Slim still feels the tingle.

"I still get scared before I go onstage," claims the 64-year-old bluesman, whose gruff vocals and biting guitar lines sure don't sound like the work of a guy with stage fright. "It's true. I might not be scared really, but I do get nervous. It's like a tingle.

"Every time I walk into someplace I'm gonna play, I get that little tingle. You never forget that -- and I never want to forget that. Because once you lose that, the thrill is gone out of it, you know what I mean?"

For Slim, the blues have been the thrill of a lifetime. Born Morris Holt in 1937 to sharecropper parents in Grenada, Miss., he first fell in love with music watching the church pianist. But his dreams of tickling the ivories ended abruptly in a farm accident.

"I got my hand caught in a cotton gin and I lost my finger," he says. "It was the little finger on my right hand. So I couldn't play piano no more -- well, I could still play it but I couldn't play it right no more.

"But I was determined to play music. So I kept at it and I got my first guitar when I was about 12."

And his first guitar teacher -- none other than Magic Sam Maghett, a childhood friend who went on to become a legendary Chicago blues picker.

"We was good friends," remembers Slim, who took his stage name from Sam. "We used to go school together and to church. Then we would go to his house or mine and sit under the shade tree and play acoustic guitar.

"Then when we got older he went off to Chicago and a while later, I followed him. Well, I wasn't really following him. I knew he was in Chicago and I really wanted to get out of the South."

The year was 1958, and Sam knew he had made the right decision as soon as he set foot in some of Chicago's famed blues clubs.

"I seen all the greats. All of 'em -- Otis Rush, Hound Dog Taylor, Freddie King, Howling, Muddy Waters, you name it. I was listening to them all. And I learned a little something from all of them."

After honing his chops for more than a decade in Chicago's rough-'n'-tumble clubs, Slim began recording in the mid-'70s and hasn't turned back. Over 25 years, he's issued more than a dozen albums of raucous, get-down blues, culminating in last year's Snakebite, his most acclaimed work. Like all his albums, it features his rasping bark -- think Howling Wolf -- and dynamic, hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye guitar work. Even Slim calls Snakebite his finest moment.

"I just put more into that one than any of the other ones," he says. "I tried to make it better than the rest. I tried to play better, I tried to sing better, I tried to make the songs better. I wanted it to be the best."

Which doesn't mean that Slim is ready to pack up his trick bag.

"I don't wanna give it up, I like it too much. Even after all these years, I still like to get to the club early and hang out. I like to get a feel for the place and have a drink or two -- maybe a little Wild Turkey or some Tanqueray."

After all, there's more than one kind of tingle.