“My ambition for 2022 is to have enough work that I have to pay taxes,” said Homans, a blues musician better known by his stage name, Watermelon Slim. “I have way more (free) time than I want.”
Homans and his two-man band — John Allouise on bass and Bryan Shaw on drums — were on a European tour in early 2020 when the COVID-19 virus began gaining a toehold around the world.
“I’ve been an unemployed musician since then,” Homans said, noting that they played a gig in Paris on Feb. 22, 2020, before flying home on Feb. 24, 2020. It would be their last for a while.
Homans just might get his taxpayer wish. Watermelon Slim is performing tonight at Southbound Bar & Grill in Springfield, Missouri, and Saturday at BB’s Jazz, Blues and Soups in St. Louis. In between, he’ll play Friday on the downtown Jacksonville square as part of Jacksonville Main Street’s Downtown Concert Series.
“I bought a new band van … in January (2020) before we went over there,” Homans said of the European tour. “I thought we had some good road coming. But it’s sat, 3,000 miles in a year and a half. I’m glad to get this van out of the driveway.”
Homans is, perhaps, his own harshest critic. He claims not to be the best slide guitarist or harmonica player — “Instrumentally, I might be average” — but that could be because the musicians with whom he’s comparing himself are the likes of musical virtuoso and blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa, who was all of 12 when he toured with B.B. King.
Homans also looks up to blues legends John Lee Hooker, Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters.
“I have pretty exacting recording standards,” Homans said, noting the 13 CDs he’s released in his career. “Stuff doesn’t go out of the studio if it isn’t right. I’m not an audiophile, but I know what something’s supposed to sound like.”
He also makes a point in his performances of finding that just-right sound, a skill he realized he had at an early age.
“I first heard the blues at 5 years old,” he said. “I joined the church at 6 and was singing along with honky-tonk by 7.”
It was a housekeeper singing John Lee Hooker tunes who introduced Homans to the blues and that church — he grew up in the Episcopal faith, attending Catholic school — that showed him he could sing on key and harmonize with whatever music was thrown his way.
And the blues he sings? They’re the real deal.
“The songs I’m singing, I have lived them,” Homans said. “I didn’t pick cotton, but I’ve unloaded railroad cars full of cement bags. I’ve been an over-the-road trucker … drove in 48 states.”
He also attended college on a fencing scholarship, has two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree, and is a member of Mensa International, the world’s “largest and oldest high IQ society”. He has worked as a journalist, a teacher with at least a handful of certifications, and has held a range of blue-collar jobs.
But it was music to which he’s always returned.
He was recuperating in an Army hospital in Vietnam when he bought his first slide guitar.
“I met an old Vietnamese man that happened to have this nastiest guitar with six rusty strings on it,” Homans said. “I asked how much it cost. He said $5. I gave him $5. I started that day trying to reproduce what I had heard. I’m left-handed and play a right-handed guitar backwards. I started with my (Army-issued) Zippo lighter as a slide.”
Homans sang to himself as he drove trucks, as he worked in a sawmill. Whatever job he did, he sang.
He competed in 2002 in the International Blues Challenge in Memphis and has garnered multiple Blues Music Award nominations, including six each in 2007 and 2008. Only B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray have landed six BMA nominations in a year and only Homans has earned 12 in a consecutive two-year span.
“In 2004, I got my first Blues Music Award nomination,” Homans said. “My mother said, ‘You finally amounted to something.’ I was 50something years old when she saw that this dream I had been pursuing — against hers and everyone’s wishes — had borne fruit. Now it has yielded fruit aplenty.”
Still, the 72-year-old Homans also is a partner in a small restaurant, the Bluesberry Cafe in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and counts his main jobs there — in addition to playing for the Sunday morning Blues and Breakfast and a Monday night gig — as the dishwasher and heavy lifter.
“I’m the guy who does the labor,” he said. “Who lifts all the heavy stuff, takes it from Point A to Point B. I’ll be a laborer until I die.”
Watermelon Slim will be in concert from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday on the downtown Jacksonville square as part of the Jacksonville Main Street Downtown Concert Series. Admission is free. Refreshments will be available starting at 6 p.m. The after-party will be at KJB’s.
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Watermelon Slim itching for Tax Day to come - Jacksonville Journal-Courier
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