Watermelon Slim and the Workers

jack of all trades, master of one

By Josh Markle

It is a safe bet you’ve never met anybody like Bill Homans. The bluesman better known as Watermelon Slim is living a life as charmed as it is unique. After dropping out of school to fight in Vietnam, Slim found himself laid-up in a hospital bed learning to play slide guitar with a pick fashioned out of an old coffee can. He came back to the US and released an album of protest songs, purportedly the only release by a Vietnam veteran put out while the war was still going. That was 1973. Somewhere between then and now, Slim’s tried his hand at almost everything at least once to pay the bills: he’s sold firewood, played sports, trucked, and broken the law. He has even farmed watermelons, hence the name. Throw two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree in history in there, too. The only constant is Slim’s penchant for hard work. He is a bluesman of the old school in both art and life.

Now, Slim is making another transition: he’s collecting accolades as a top blues player. It’s been 35 years since his first record, but he is playing with all of the vigour, focus, and urgency you might have heard had he signed a record deal as a young vet in the early ’70s.

“I was negotiating with Atlantic Records in 1973 when the OPEC oil embargo occurred,” says Slim. “I was immediately jettisoned. Many years later, I became friends with Jerry Wexler, but in 1973, I was not really a talented enough instrumentalist that the company could not afford to ignore me. I have only really been a technically talented enough guitarist to be interesting in a commercial sense this century. I’m a late bloomer.”

Slim might be a late bloomer by conventional standards, but he is adamant you don’t start out sounding like he does the first time you get up on stage. In guttural moans, Slim gums each word as he sings it like your grandfather might with a Werther’s Original. It’s not a congenital sound, but one that has been carved by life’s hardships. “I spent nearly 30 years paying my dues,” says Slim, “learning my art, on stages on both coasts and places in between. You don’t just sing the blues the first time you try it. It’s not that simple, no matter how many people buy Jonny Lang records.”

“The blues is physical, visceral music,” says Slim. “It is, before anything else, work music. Although the academic curriculum I set for myself was designed from the beginning to make me a master writer, I would never have been a bluesman – I could not presume to call myself one – if I had not done the work I have done. I have never picked cotton, but I have farmed. I have never been a slave, but I have worked for son-of-a-bitch bosses who might easily be called slave drivers. I have also had some great bosses that I would bust my butt for willingly, like Junior Jackson, whom I’m referring to in ‘Sawmill Holler’ on No Paid Holidays.”

The blues is inherently visceral and raw, but few modern acts are able to capture it like Watermelon Slim. While much of that is rooted in his storied past, some of the urgency must be attributable to confronting his own mortality. After a long life of labouring with his body rather than his guitar, Slim has recently suffered a series of setbacks to his health. Unbeknownst to him until earlier this year, a fall in the mid ’90s actually broke his spine, which is now a constant source of pain. And in 2002, as Slim prepared to focus on his blues career full time, a heart attack nearly killed him.

“It did not change my path,” says Slim. “I had already finished the Big Shoes To Fill sessions in August of 2002, after making the Fried Okra Jones demo EP in 2001. The heart attack occurred in October of 2002. It just focused me. I became more aware that I am in the latter part of my life, maybe in the very late part of it.”

Despite his reluctance to do another long tour again due to the impact on his health – he is currently on one that will see him stopping in twenty different places throughout Turkey alone – Slim shows few other signs of slowing down. He has a new record coming out in early 2009, his first foray into country and western, a live DVD, a biography co-authored with renowned journalist, Michael Kinsman, and a burgeoning oil painting career.

“God has blessed me over and over again with a full life that provides me with songs and lessons learned that most people could never even dream of,” says Slim. “Amen!”

Who: Watermelon Slim and The Workers

When: December 5th (Epcor Centre, Calgary)