Watermelon Slim – Winners of Us All
Dreamplay Records
14 Tracks – 59 minutes
Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans was born in Boston. His father was a progressive attorney and freedom rider. His brother is a classical musician. He grew up in North Carolina where he heard his housekeeper singing John lee Hooker songs. He attended college on a fencing scholarship but left early to enlist to fight in Vietnam. While laid up on a hospital bed in Vietnam, he taught himself how to play on a $5 upside down left-handed guitar using a triangle pick he cut from the lid of a coffee can and using his Zippo lighter as a slide. He ended his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1970 and in 1973 released his first album, a furiously anti-war album, Merry Airbrakes.
He returned to Boston and took on many jobs over the next 30 years including truck driver, forklift operator, sawmiller (where he lost a partial finger), a funeral officiator, among others. He also became a small-time criminal, which ultimately forced him to leave Boston and relocate to Oklahoma where he became a watermelon farmer, thus giving him his nickname of Watermelon Slim.
Somewhere in between all those activities, He completed two undergrad and a master’s degree and joined Mensa, the organization that recognizes certified genius. But he continued truck driving as his principal income using the long hours in a truck singing a cappella songs to himself that kept him awake and entertained, but also became the source of the songs for his albums. In 2002, he had a near-fatal heart attack. After recovering from that and with a new direction in life, he moved to a new emergence as a blues performer.
His music has received 17 Blues Music Award nominations, including six nominations in both 2007 and 2008. Only a few musicians like B.B. King and Buddy Guy have ever received six nominations in a single year and Slim holds the record as the only artist to receive six nominations in two consecutive years. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2015.
His gruff, but passionate vocals intertwine on fourteen original songs with his razor-sharp slide guitar work and harmonica, which he says is in keeping with the style of Slim Harpo. He is joined on the album by Joanna Miller on drums & percussion, Gilles Fournier on upright bass, John Soles on electric bass, Jay Nowicki on electric guitar, Jeremy Rusu on piano, clarinet, accordion and mandolin, Don Zueff on fiddle, and with vocals from Jolene Higgins, Sol James and Ray “Coco” Stevenson. Scott Nolan plays the drums, percussion, guitar and adds vocals on the title song. Chris Carmichael plays drums on “They Didn’t Even Give Us a Parade”.
The opening track “Pick Up My Guidon”, is a reference to a flag or pennant that is carried by a military platoon signifying their unit designation. With a slightly gospel air, the song provides a brief look back at his military life, but states that “after all of these years, I only serve with God”. “Mean Streets” addresses those who are homeless and questions those who have not experienced the horrors of that experience and he seems to express it from a personal experience as he says, “don’t ever let me go back on those mean streets again.” “Australia” is an a cappella song with Slim backed by a men’s choir in Irish bar-type vocal and a brief blast of harmonica.
In another bar song complete with a honky-tonk piano, he sings, ” I was home from the factory and no one else was around, had a hard day at 9 to 5…I was feeling like a cross between Lightning Hopkins and King Kong, picked up my guitar and played “Four Hideous Little Songs”. “Cabbagetown” is a quiet acoustic, slightly countrified look back at a time he left a community and “gave up drink”. “WBCN” starts with a drone and moves into a fiddle and military sounding drumbeat. The song again addresses a past military life.
“You’re Going to Need Someone on Your Bond” is a Delta blues featuring Slim’s slide guitar work. “Winners of Us All” acknowledges all of the people that live on wages that just lets them get by as he is “singing for a whole bunch of people, billions of folks living far from on high / they don’t buy new pick-ups, they can’t afford CD’s / they don’t matter to folks who smell like Calvin Klein”. “They Never Even Gave Us a Parade” again references his time in Vietnam and his return after being wounded. His harmonica delivers a sympathetic cry to the lyrics addressing the wounded and dead from that occurred in the conflict.
He plays the National Steel as he declares that he cannot stay with the “cold wind blowing in my veins” with the “Northern Blues”. “Max The Baseball Clown” is a bouncy tribute to the clown that made the rounds of baseball stadiums back in Slim’s early days in North Carolina. An American Indian chant opens the next song as Slim declares “one day I am going to make my “Wolf Cry”.
“Barrett’s Privateers” is a rousing sea shanty addressing the life of seafaring sailors. The album concludes with “Dark Genius”, first addressing the life of President John F. Kennedy and then shifting to Slim’s willingness to “always speak my mind, get my ass in trouble / if oppression pushes you down, friends are hard to find / that’s when I’ll come running on the double / if martial law comes down and the picture turns around / and see me grimace inside then you know that I set and sung enough, it is time to show my stuff/ and I’ll take a heavy toll before I go”.
Watermelon Slim’s lyrics are just as sharp and poignant as ever, which has always been the pinnacle of his work on his many albums over the years. Here he is reminiscing about his many past experiences, speaks for how the common man survives today, and concludes with a song seemingly addressing a concern for what the world is coming to presently. The songs sometimes drift away from what I consider the blues, but he is presenting a cross-section of life, which makes you want to listen carefully.