Watermelon Slim - Watermelon Slim Interview

WATERMELON SLIM (William P. Homans)
Interview by Billy Hutchinson - Blues Matters - United Kingdom- 2004

BM: First off Homans is a strange name to the British, where does it originate & what does the "P" stand for in your name?

WS: May sound strange, but it is utterly English. My first American ancestors were English indentured servants. The first section of the family homestead, in Canton, Massachusetts, dates from the second decade of the 18th century. It may originally have been Homan, which is a little more common in the US also. Holman is the most common of the three names, all of which I have been misidentified with. My middle name is Perkins, another proper English name.

BM: Give us your background if you will?

WS: Born in Boston, raised in Asheville, North Carolina, once no more than the big town in the western mountains of the state, but now a small city and sub-dominant industrial hub. Parents divorced very early (I was 3) and mother went to NC, where her parents lived. Raised in religious-sponsored private schools-- elementary was Catholic, high school was mostly Anglican (I am a confirmed Episcopalian). Tried college at 19, didn't do well, dropped out, enlisted in the Army and volunteered for Vietnam. That was a mess, of course, and I joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) within a year of my return to the states. Made my first album in 1973, influenced deeply by Nam and my antiwar activities. Arrested as part of the Clamshell Alliance anti-nuclear sitin of 1977. Chief field assistant on the PhD dissertation that remains the geomorphological proof of the unsuitability of emplacing nuclear waste in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, built by the Department of Energy in Eddy County, New Mexico. Independent investigator (as part of my masters' thesis) of unfollowed and suppressed leads in the Murrah Federal Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh. Currently, Oklahoma contact for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Life member. I remain an environmental and political activist. I believe most people regarded me as a radical then, in the 70s and 80s, but the political spectrum has skewed so far to the right that my thinking is probably, in relative terms, farther outside the mainstream today than in 1972. BA, University of Oregon, history (with departmental honors) and journalism, 1986; MA, Oklahoma State University, history, 2000. High school teaching subject endorsements in history, English, geography, economics, political science and psychology. Through all my life, then and now, I have been a blue-collar laborer and trucker, which all has much more to do with my blues than the above intellectual activities.

BM: Barbara Dane a past interviewee, told me that you where in pretty bad shape due to your involvement in the Vietnam War. Are you one of those ex-soldiers that now see the futility of war?

WS: I was an angry young man. I saw the futility of it right enough, and soon. But I will not necessarily agree with my friend Barbara that I was in bad shape because of the war, There are vets all over America who really NEED their disability payments. I myself have never claimed any disability, and never will.

BM: You seem a philosophical kind of a guy is this totally due to your war experiences or were you always a deeper thinker?

WS: I always have liked to read, and the education I described briefly above was superior, from beginning to end. I have been very lucky to have not one, or two, but at least a dozen excellent and inspiring professors and teachers in my intermittent academic career. I'm probably the most literate bluesman in the world (or no less than Taj Majal, anyway). It has taken the duration of an adulthood for me to think as I do. If you find it deep, that's good. I am a follower of your countryman, the evolutionary existentialist Colin Wilson. Certain of his writings have had a profound effect on me since the 1970s.

BM: Quite a few of us who have heard you have commented on how much a Caucasian can sound like an African American's voice. Is your clipped Blues singing voice affected for performance at all?

WS: I am not sure what you are referring to by clipped. This is my voice. I remember many, many years ago, 40 anyway, trying to sound like Sonny Boy Williamson. But as I have gradually developed my own style, I have dispensed with any affect, and I just sing.

BM: You are on the Southern Records label, how come it is so involved with artists who have done well in the Memphis International Blues Challenge.

WS: Chris Hardwick has been one of their judges since its inception. Talent comes to his attention, and he makes it a point to hear it.

BM: What's it like playing the Blues in Oklahoma?

WS: I am something like a legend here, though some would just call me a well-founded rumor. However, it appears, as I have told my friends in France, that I am going to have to leave Oklahoma, a place for which I have great affection, to prosper in the blues.

BM: Are the Fried Okra Jones band a separate entity, your band or what?

WS: FOJ no longer exists. They were my band, though as Texas Ray Isom would tell you, they were his band too. Ray, the guitarist, is now a fire investigator with the Fort Worth TX fire department; Adam Enevoldsen, the bass player, i so good that when he left Oklahoma for Chicago last year, he immediately hooked up with another signed group, the Groove Hogs, from Madison, Wisconsin; Kyle Enevoldsen, Adam's cousin, is a brilliant man already scaling the heights of the journal;ism industry. He has far too good a job and prospects in media and/or foreign service to be hanging around here, but I get to play with him infrequently.

BM: On your new solo CD "Up Close & Personal" you cover a Sonny Boy Williamson, but I get more of a Walter 'Shakey' Horton sound to the harp.

WS: I met Big Walter a few months before he died, when he was playing with Eddie Shaw and the Wolf Gang. You are perceptive to notice the influence from him. However, I was also influenced by one of his contemporaries, George Mayweather, known as "Earring George." George was harp player with Little Walter's band when WalterJacobs was ill, back in the 50s. I spent part of the last decade of George's life playing and living around him, as well as his half-brother, Boston bassplayer Silas Hubbard. We were fishing buddies.

BM: I find some resemblances in your style with Ron Hacker of San Francisco, he is unaware of you; are you of him?

WS: Nope, doesn't ring a bell.

BM: You have played with some jaw-dropping Blues artists. Have you any stories to tell on that?

WS: Besides George, Henry Vestine, "The Sunflower" of Canned Heat, is the bluesman I actually hung around with most extensively. Henry played in my Oregon group, Church of the Blues, when he wasn't touring with the Heat, back in 1985-86. We were roommates for a period of months. Henry drank an awful lot, but he and I always got along great. I did play with John Lee Hooker and Champion Jack Dupree, one-shot deals widely separated by the years. John Lee treated me, a 21-year-old recently-returned Viwtnam vet, and still a wannabe bluesman, with great respect. He was, and he remains, the greatest hero of my life, above Muddy Waters, whom I never met, and even above William Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language.

BM: I believe you are quite handy with the brush, and I don't mean skirting boards & stuff.

WS: I've been giving more attention to my painting especially since I have been separated from my family. Here's a sample:

SunWorld

BM: As we are in conversation you are ready to undertake your first tour of this country without a break between gigs, you are probably wondering what the hell it is going to be like - are you?

WS: As I practice, coming up to the time I must put up or shut up, (sheepish laughter) I am thinking that I will have to really have my instrumental chops tight, because I am not going to be able to belt the blues vocally for several hours a night 12 nights in a row. I've never tried to sing that much that often. I will have to sing some songs in my lower register (which runs all the way down to basso profundo) that I had used to sing in the second tenor/tenor range. And I will have to demonstrate all different kinds of mastery-- not flash, that's impossible for me-- but mastery on all my instruments. I used to think of myself as a harp player who played some guitar. Now, I would call myself a multi-instrumentalist songwriter/singer.

BM: Is the spit & sawdust, lowdown & dirty delta blues what you are about, or should we dig deeper into your back catalogue?

WS: There's three themes in the blues I usually sing: work, frustrated expectations (in relationships, of course, but not limited to them), and consciousness of personal mortality. I'm gonna die. I have a trucker's face and hands; I am the trucker's face and hands. I may yet die a trucker. I sing what I have lived, in the blues. Now, in country and western, I remain completely individualistic, but I consider my audience, and I suspect that you will say that that material is a bit more universally accessible. Mom and girls and trucks and trains and booze.

WS: You don't have long to wait. I'm probably too complicated a fellow to say that the spit 'n' sawdust (I have indeed been a sawmiller) is all what I'm about. But that's what you're going to hear in a couple of weeks.

Regards, Billy,
Watermelon Slim