Watermelon Slim & the Workers
Country Bluesman Credits Experience for Making Him a Better Musician
The life of country blues musician Watermelon Slim has been extraordinary. He has been a soldier, a trucker, an investigator, a sawmill worker (missing part of his right hand as a result), has a degree in journalism and an MA in history, set foot in every one of the 50 states, toured Europe and all of North America, speaks four languages (though he swears his Dutch is a bit rough), and now, in his early 60s, Slim is one of the foremost country blues men in North America.
“I’ve always been anythin’ but a musician,” Slim says in his thick southern drawl, voice dripping through the phone line like warm treacle.
For him, music was a long time coming. Though he’s been singing and writing songs since he taught himself to play guitar in a war hospital during the Vietnam War, he only released his first major label album, Up Close and Personal, in 2004. It was nominated for a W.C. Handy award for best debut that same year, an experience he found both edifying and humorous.
“I guess I’m both a novice and a veteran,” he says. “I don’t reckon I was ready to be doin’ what I’m doin’ before I actually started doin’ it, though.”
Slim credits his extremely varied life and his education for making him the successful songwriter that he is today.
“Everything I’ve been makes me what I am now,” he says. “You don’t have to think much to be a rock star. More, you have to be young and good lookin’ — that’s passed me by.” He laughs. “But what I write about — long term relationships, mortality, work — I couldn’t write about that if I hadn’t lived it all.”
This fact is evidenced in the track names on his first two major label releases, “Truck Hollers #1 and #2,” “Blue Freightliner,” and “Hard Labor.” His latest album, the Wheel Man, has a sawmill holler on it that Slim sings on the phone.
“I used to sing it when I was working — ‘Oh, Mr Jackson…’ — see, that was my boss. Singin’ kept me from going crazy.”
When asked about his progress as an artist, Slim is close-lipped.
“Well, I don’t want to tip off the critics, or anythin’, but I think this new album has a few more R&B elements,” he says. “It’s balanced with obscure blues material — songs that we can’t even find the writer of, or the company that first published it. That’s what blues is, though. It’s the experiences, not the person.”
It’s for this reason that Slim is actually quite grateful that his first musical effort, an independent album released in 1973, was a victim of circumstance.
“I was a civilian at the time — I was actually the only Vietnam vet to record a protest album during the Vietnam War,” he says. “And there was a man come down from Atlantic records interested in re-releasing it, but that was the year of the OPEC crisis, and the price of oil — what vinyl records are made from — went up three, four hundred percent. After that they didn’t want to waste their time on somethin’ that wasn’t a sure thing.”
Though some might be bitter about this unfortunate turn of events, Slim himself is philosophical.
“I gained invaluable experience,” he says. “It’s like a bottle of wine that someone puts in the back of the closet and maybe forgets about, so it doesn’t get found for another twenty years or so. You open it then, and say, ‘hey, that’s pretty good,’ but it wouldn’t have tasted right if they hadn’t left it all that time.”
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