Watermelon Slim: "No Paid Holidays"

 There are plenty of blues nicknames in the world, and plenty of blues wannabees who adopt them -- "magic," "lightnin'," "slim" -- you know them well. 

But if your name is Watermelon Slim, you can be pretty sure no one else is ready to pick up that moniker and run with it. In fact, you might wonder why anybody would pick it up it in the first place. It became attached to Bill Homans when he found himself at the end of a long list of day jobs working on a watermelon farm in Oklahoma. Once he had the name, I'm sure everything else just fell into place.

His bio is as weird as it is long, sprinkled with melon farms and masters degrees and memories of Vietnam. You can read the fascinating story of his life on his Web site.  In fact, I recommend it.

But if you just want to listen to some great blues, and some great music that Slim has carved out of the blues, listen to his new CD, "No Paid Holidays" (NorthernBlues Music). From the opening guitar riffs of "Blues for Howard," and Slim's always-provocative lyrical wordplay, it's one musical treat after another.

Slim plays a mean, stinging slide (his bio says that he taught himself upside-down left-handed slide guitar on a $5 balsawood guitar with his Army-issued Zippo lighter as his slide.) And he plays dobro and harp, with some percussion thrown in. But his musical skills may be secondary to the way he assembles the tracks for his albums -- mixing tightly crafted originals like "Archetypical Blues No. 2" (sounds more like a Dylan title) and "Dad in the Distance" and "bloody Burmese Blues" with the likes of Mississippi Fred McDowell and  Al Perkins and Emery "Detroit Junior" Williams.

Slim's  tastes are eclectic, and his music shows the results, and he can easily mix in a harp and acapella version of "And when I Die." "Max the Baseball Clown" is another slightly oddball turn that even manges to rhyme in Willie Stargell's name.

Slim has won a bunch of awards lately, including this year's Blues Music Awards for Band of the Year (The Workers), and Album of the Year ("Wheel Man"). If you've never heard this unique bluesman, give this one a try. If you have, you'll want more.

And here's a sample of one of my favorite cutes, "Blues For Howard."