Watermelon Slim and the Workers
No Paid Holidays
(Northern Blues, 2008)

In recent years, Watermelon Slim has risen to the top of the blues genre; his last LP, The Wheel Man, helped him garner six nominations at the Blues Music Awards, a feat that has only been accomplished by legends like B.B. King and Buddy Guy. Slim’s got his own legend, and it starts back in Vietnam, where he learned how to play slide guitar backwards on a lap dobro with a jagged pick cut from a tin can and his standard-issue Zippo lighter subbing in as slide. Slim is credited as the first Vietnam veteran to release an album, 1973’s self-titled protest blues record Merry Airbrakes, which contains lines like, “If I die in battle / Pick up my AK-47 and fight on.” Back then, he was known by his given name, Bill Homans, and described his album as “anti-capitalistic, anti-imperialistic,” and containing “incontrovertible underground credentials.”

It was 30 years before Slim released another album. But he stayed busy working a handful of odd-jobs, and picked up his blues name while harvesting watermelons, as he recalled on 2003’s “They Call Me Watermelon Slim”: “I was standing in a great big old field full of watermelons down in southeast Oklahoma about 23 years ago. Had me a great big ol’ slice of red watermelon in one hand and a Hohner D harmonica in the other—not a woman within 20 miles. I was getting to be a lonely SOB. But I looked at the harmonica and I looked at that piece of watermelon and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I got me a blues name! I’m Watermelon Slim.’ And I been Watermelon Slim to this day.”

No Paid Holidays is somewhat more introverted than the boogie-heavy WheelMan. But Slim finds room for his full range of styles, from the field holler, through the Mississippi Delta blues, and on up ol’ muddy to the rockin’ Chicago blues. Slim also manages to break from traditional blues chord progressions on the excellent honky-tonk number “Into the Sunset” and the somber paternal dirge “Dad in the Distance” (You’re where you should be, and though you are gone / You’re the one and only reason I’m galloping on).

“This Traveling Life” is a vox-and-harmonica prayer of thanksgiving (“Thank you for every miracle you send my way / Ooh, and best of all / For letting me see / Things the way they are / The way they are”). “And When I Die” is similarly composed, with Slim singing, “All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me / And all I ask of dying is to go naturally.” Oddly enough the latter number is the more upbeat of the two. Or maybe from Slim’s perspective that’s not at all odd, as the laughs really come rolling in on “Max the Baseball Clown”, on which he reminisces about an all-but-forgotten grandstand entertainer: “It’s taken me this many years to ask myself, ‘Is he alive or dead?’” (Personally, I’m afraid that Max has had his last laugh.)

“I’ve Got a Toothache” is a spoken-word number beat down by a slow thud, and laced with Slim’s slide dobro as he seeks a remedy for the pain: “I got me a glass of bourbon here—Wild Turkey. I’m gonna drain it down.” Slim has likely had his share of toothaches, as his trademark sound is a vocal delivery that is both hampered and enhanced by a dearth of teeth that has left his consonants with a lisp-like quality.

Slim’s subject matter comes full-circle with “The Bloody Burmese Blues”, on which he notes, “We are in this lovely hotel looking down on a war zone / We saw it all breaking down, soldiers and the people they were firing on.” Thirty-five years have lapsed since the Merry Airbrakes’ “Draft Board Blues”, but listening to it you can already hear Slim’s down-to-the-grit perspective and the sharp bite of his overdriven harmonica.

Listen: Various Tracks [at watermelonslim.com]

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