Biography

Bill 'Watermelon Slim' Homans has built an outstanding reputation with his raw, impassioned intensity. HARP Magazine writes "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."

For years concert reviews continually liken a Watermelon Slim performance to spiritual in its energy. Rochester City News wrote "Dressed like a pimped out Easter egg…the man freight-trained the harp, threw periodic tantrums (of the Pentecostal variety) on the dance floor and diddled on Dobro." The Ottawa Xress wrote "Few artists have the capacity to effortlessly harness a warehouse of knowledge into every note, movement and utterance on a stage." Slim's hometown Norman Transcript puts it succinctly with "Slim's charisma is uncommon."

The industry seems to agree on all fronts. Watermelon Slim garnered a record-tying six 2007 Blues Music Award nominations. Only the likes of B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray have ever landed six in a year. In 2008 Slim landed six more making him the only blues artist in history to be awarded as many in two years.

Slim's last two records were both ranked #1 in MOJO Magazine's annual Top Blues CD rankings. Industry awards include The Independent Music Award for Blues Album of the Year, The Blues Critic Award and The Maple Blues Award among others. For blues radio, Slim hit #1 on the Living Blues Charts, top five on the Roots Music Report and debuted in the top ten in Billboard. Yet perhaps Slim's most impressive industry accolade is the liner notes eagerly written by the legendary Jerry Wexler who called him a "one-of-a-kind pickin' n singing Okie dynamo."

Slim has been embraced for his music, performances, backstory and persona. He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, The BBC's World Service and has been featured in publications like HARP, Relix, Paste, Guitar One, and MOJO as well as newspapers like The London Times, Toronto Star, Chicago Sun-Times, The Village Voice, Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Memphis Flyer led its terrific CD review with the question "Does anyone in modern pop music have a more intriguing biography than Bill "Watermelon Slim" Homans?" Slim was born in Boston and raised in North Carolina listening to his maid sing John Lee Hooker songs. His father was a progressive attorney and ex-freedom rider and his brother is a classical musician. Slim dropped out of college to enlist for Vietnam. While laid up in a Vietnam hospital bed he taught himself 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.

Slim first appeared on the music scene with the release of the only known record by a veteran during the Vietnam War. The project was Merry Airbrakes, a 1973 protest tinged LP with tracks Country Joe McDonald later covered. In the following 30 plus years Slim 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. At one point he was forced to flee Boston where he played peace rallies, sit-ins and rabbleroused musically with the likes of Bonnie Raitt.

He ended in his current home state of Oklahoma as farming watermelons - hence his stage name. Somehow in those decades Slim completed two undergrad degrees, on masters and joined Mensa, the social networking group reserved for members with certified genius IQs.

Throughout his storied past, it has always been truck driving that Slim returned to. While trucking and hauling industrial waste for thankless bosses at hourly wages to support himself and his family, his id yearned for release of the musician inside. Many of Slim's current songs began a cappella in his rig keeping him awake and entertained.

In 2002 Slim suffered a near fatal heart attack. His brush with death gave him a new perspective on mortality, direction and life ambitions. He says, "Everything I do now has a sharper pleasure to it. I've lived a fuller life than most people could in two. If I go now, I've got a good education, I've lived on three continents, and I've played music with a bunch of immortal blues players. I've fought in a war and against a war. I've seen an awful lot and I've done an awful lot. If my plane went down tomorrow, I'd go out on top." And when you watch him perform, you know it's true.