Watermelon Slim & the Truckers
7-23-2022
"The most exciting and authentic blues performer I've heard in years." A.W., Paste Magazine
An ever-expanding career of ramshackle grandeur. Bill "Watermelon Slim" Homans has built a remarkable reputation with his raw, impassioned intensity. HARP Magazine wrote "From sizzling slide guitar...to nitty-gritty harp blowing...to a gruff, resonating Okie twang, Slim delivers acutely personal workingman blues with both hands on the wheel of life, a bottle of hooch in his pocket, and the Bible on the passenger seat." Paste Magazine writes "He's one hell of a bottleneck guitarist, and he's got that cry in his voice that only the greatest singers in the genre have had before him."
The industry agrees on all fronts. Watermelon Slim & The Truckers have garnered 17 Blues Music Award nominations in four years including a record-tying six in both 2007 & 2008. Only the likes of B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray have landed six in a year and Slim is the only blues artist in history with twelve in two consecutive years. In Spring 2009 he was the cover story of Blues Revue magazine.
Slim taught himself, while laid up in a Vietnam hospital bed, upside-down left-handed slide guitar on a $5 balsawood model using a triangle pick cut from a rusty coffee can top and his Army issued Zippo lighter as the slide. He has been a truck driver, forklift operator, sawmiller (where he lost a partial finger), firewood salesman, collection agent, funeral officiator and at times a small time criminal. Due to aforementioned criminality, Slim was forced to flee Boston where he had played peace rallies, sit-ins and rabbleroused musically with the likes of Bonnie Raitt. Recently Raitt singled out Slim to her audience as a living blues legend during a summer 2009 performance. From Boston, Slim landed in his current home state of Oklahoma farming watermelons - hence his stage name. Somewhere in those decades since Vietnam Slim completed two undergrad and a master's degree, started a family, painted art and joined Mensa, the social networking group reserved for members with certified genius IQs. When he's not on tour Slim loves to fish and garden.
If you like Blues - Watermelon Slim is the real deal.
2x Winner: 2008 Blues Music Award Band of the Year and Album of the Year
2x Winner: 2006 & 2007 MOJO Magazine's #1 Blues Album of the Year Winner:
6th Annual Independent Music Awards Blues Album of the Year
VIDEO 1 VIDEO 2
"The most exciting and authentic blues performer I've heard in years." A.W., Paste Magazine
An ever-expanding career of ramshackle grandeur. Bill "Watermelon Slim" Homans has built a remarkable reputation with his raw, impassioned intensity. HARP Magazine wrote "From sizzling slide guitar...to nitty-gritty harp blowing...to a gruff, resonating Okie twang, Slim delivers acutely personal workingman blues with both hands on the wheel of life, a bottle of hooch in his pocket, and the Bible on the passenger seat." Paste Magazine writes "He's one hell of a bottleneck guitarist, and he's got that cry in his voice that only the greatest singers in the genre have had before him."
The industry agrees on all fronts. Watermelon Slim & The Truckers have garnered 17 Blues Music Award nominations in four years including a record-tying six in both 2007 & 2008. Only the likes of B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray have landed six in a year and Slim is the only blues artist in history with twelve in two consecutive years. In Spring 2009 he was the cover story of Blues Revue magazine.
Slim taught himself, while laid up in a Vietnam hospital bed, upside-down left-handed slide guitar on a $5 balsawood model using a triangle pick cut from a rusty coffee can top and his Army issued Zippo lighter as the slide. He has been a truck driver, forklift operator, sawmiller (where he lost a partial finger), firewood salesman, collection agent, funeral officiator and at times a small time criminal. Due to aforementioned criminality, Slim was forced to flee Boston where he had played peace rallies, sit-ins and rabbleroused musically with the likes of Bonnie Raitt. Recently Raitt singled out Slim to her audience as a living blues legend during a summer 2009 performance. From Boston, Slim landed in his current home state of Oklahoma farming watermelons - hence his stage name. Somewhere in those decades since Vietnam Slim completed two undergrad and a master's degree, started a family, painted art and joined Mensa, the social networking group reserved for members with certified genius IQs. When he's not on tour Slim loves to fish and garden.
If you like Blues - Watermelon Slim is the real deal.
2x Winner: 2008 Blues Music Award Band of the Year and Album of the Year
2x Winner: 2006 & 2007 MOJO Magazine's #1 Blues Album of the Year Winner:
6th Annual Independent Music Awards Blues Album of the Year
VIDEO 1 VIDEO 2