Ramping up the Blues
Ramping up the Blues
March 17, 2010
by Jennifer Chancellor
Tulsa World
Bill Homans' life is a story of opportunities.
Not the sort where he meets a shadowy figure at the crossroads and sells his soul, mind you. Bluesman Watermelon Slim's peripatetic ways have led him down less predictable paths.
While in the Vietnam War, he was laid up with an injury when he taught himself how to play slide guitar on a balsawood model and a piece of a coffee can. Left handed. In bed.
He is a bluesman, through and through. He's been a truck driver. Vietnam veteran. Choir singer. Baseball fan. Bluesman. College graduate. Sawmiller. Funeral officiator and William Shakespeare enthusiast. He's worked hard labor hauling industrial waste, and once broke his back when he fell out of a rig.
He was born in Boston, but didn't live there long. Slim was raised in Asheville, N.C., by his mother, he said. "I'm a Southerner. My brother's more of a Yankee."
But he's also a Sooner. Make that a Cowboy. In 2000, he earned his master's degree in history from Oklahoma State University. He lived in Stillwater "longer than I lived any other place in my life." That was a whopping seven years. But it wasn't his first time in Oklahoma.
Earlier in his life, after serving in Vietnam, he earned his moniker while blowin' a harmonica and working watermelon fields in "Little Dixie" on a small farm in Southeastern Oklahoma, in the early 1980s.
"I'm basically an old truck driver and sawmiller that found something easier to do," Slim said in his gravelly baritone, then laughed.
Rooted in the Blues
Hogwash. The man has earned a record 16 Blues Music Award nominations in the last three years. Said the late R&B producer Jerry Wexler of Slim's talent, "Watermelon Slim incarnates the deepest and truest roots of American music."
Slim was friends with Wexler (who produced Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan) and producer and musician Willie "Pops" Mitchell (Al Green, Ann Peebles) and blues harp player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite (John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama and was the inspiration for the Blues Brothers).
Wexler quite literally invented the term "rhythm and blues," and was a consummate music maker. In his New York Times obituary, he's quoted as saying he only wanted two words on his tombstone: "More bass."
"We never talked about music," Slim said. "Believe it or not, we talked about baseball."
Wexler was a St. Louis Cardinals fan. Slim is a Boston Red Sox man. The two warmly sparred over who would win the World Series. It turns out, they both would. ("The Sox beat the Cards in '04," Slim said, making up for 1967.)
Life's travels
Baseball aside, Watermelon Slim talked not so much about music-making as about living. Everything's spoken as an "aside," like a comment about the meaning of life.
"I'll tell you about Nathan," he said, for instance, of a former band mate. "We were in a truck with a huge trailer, about eight of us, riding in the left-hand lane. The back tire blew out and there was another car next to us. Nathan slowed that thing to a stop in the left-hand lane and didn't even ding that other car.
"As a former truck driver, I tell you, that was amazing. That's the sort of man Nathan is. And he said later he'd only pulled a trailer three times."
Last year, Slim clocked more than 100,000 flight miles while touring Europe, Australia, Canada and from east to west coast and back again. This year, he plans to clock even more, via road and plane. Tulsa is the second stop on this leg of his tour.
He and his band, The Workers, will hit Nashville, Springfield, Oklahoma City, Louisville, St. Louis.
"And Kalamazoo, Michigan. People always wonder if I'm tellin' them the truth when I say I play Kalamazoo. It really does exist. It's a real place," he said, then laughed again.
"All I can do is tell the truth. Fiction just doesn't do anything for me."
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