Watermelon Slim

Watermelon Slim has been a lot of things — a truck driver, a petty criminal, a protester, a Mensa member and a melon farmer (hence the stage name). He’s also received 17 nominations from the Blues Foundation and is widely regarded as one of the best contemporary blues players on the national stage. Watermelon Slim — whose real name is Bill Homans — is a North Carolina native who attended Middlebury College in Vermont before he enlisted, during the Vietnam War. He learned to play slide guitar on a $5 balsa-wood guitar in a hospital bed in Vietnam, using a triangle pick cut from a rusty coffee can and his Army-issued Zippo as a slide. Slim came home a fervent anti-war activist and released a protest-tinged LP as Merry Airbrakes in 1973. After that, he worked as a forklift operator, a saw-miller (where he lost part of a finger), a funeral officiant and a truck driver. (His biography says that many of his tunes began as a cappella songs in his rig, in order to keep himself awake as he drove cross-country.) He returned to music in 1999 with his Fried Okra Jones EP and has churned out albums steadily ever since. (In 2006, he and his band, the Workers, garnered a record-tying six nominations from the Blues Foundation in 2007 and 2008.) The bluesman has close ties to Knuckleheads (and the venue’s owner, Frank Hicks), so Kansas City isn’t just another tour stop.