BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.8//EN TZID:America/New_York X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VEVENT UID:998@wnyblues.org DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230725T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230725T220000 DTSTAMP:20230710T201913Z URL:https://wnyblues.org/events/watermelon-slim-live-at-fanatics-pub-in-li ma-ny/ SUMMARY:Watermelon Slim Live at Fanatics Pub in Lima\, NY DESCRIPTION:\n\n\n“The most exciting and authentic blues performer I’ve heard in years.” A.W.\, Paste Magazine \;\n\n2x Winner: 2008 Blues Music Award Band of the Year and Album of the Year\n2x Winner: 2006 &\ ; 2007 MOJO Magazine’s #1 Blues Album of the Year\nWinner: 6th Annual In dependent Music Awards Blues Album of the Year\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nARTIST BIO: An ever-expanding career of ramshackle grandeur.\nBill “Watermelon Slim” Homans has built a remarkable reputation with his raw\, impassion ed intensity. HARP Magazine wrote “From sizzling slide guitar…to nitty -gritty harp blowing…to a gruff\, resonating Okie twang\, Slim delivers acutely personal workingman blues with both hands on the wheel of life\, a bottle of hooch in his pocket\, and the Bible on the passenger seat.” P aste Magazine writes “He’s one hell of a bottleneck guitarist\, and he ’s got that cry in his voice that only the greatest singers in the genre have had before him.”\n\nThe industry agrees on all fronts. Watermelon Slim &\; The Workers have garnered 17 Blues Music Award nominations in four years including a record-tying six in both 2007 &\; 2008. Only the likes of B.B. King\, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray have landed six in a year and Slim is the only blues artist in history with twelve in two consecutiv e years. In Spring 2009 he was the cover story of Blues Revue magazine. .\ n\nTwo of Slim’s records were ranked #1 in MOJO Magazine’s annual Top Blues CD rankings. Industry awards include The Independent Music Award for Blues Album of the Year\, The Blues Critic Award and Canada’s Maple Blu es Award for International Artist of the Year among others. Slim has hit # 1 on the Living Blues Charts\, top five on the Roots Music Report and debu ted in the top ten in Billboard. One of Slim’s most impressive industry accolades may be the liner notes of The Wheel Man eagerly written by the l ate legendary Jerry Wexler who called him a “one-of-a-kind pickin’ n s inging Okie dynamo.” Slim has been embraced for his music\, performances \, backstory and persona. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered \, The BBC’s World Service and has been featured in publications like Ha rp\, Relix\, Paste\, MOJO\, Oklahoma Magazine and Truckers News as well as newspapers like The London Times\, Toronto Star\, Chicago Sun-Times\, The Village Voice\, Kansas City Star\, Philadelphia Inquirer\, and Michelle S hocked’s JAMS Magazine.\n\nThe Memphis Flyer led its terrific CD review with the question “Does anyone in modern pop music have a more intriguin g biography than Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans?”\n\nSlim was born in Boston\, his father was a progressive attorney and freedom rider and his brother is a classical musician. He was raised in North Carolina listening to the housekeeper sing John Lee Hooker songs. Slim attended Middlebury o n a fencing scholarship but left early to enlist for Vietnam. While laid u p in a Vietnam hospital bed he taught himself upside-down left-handed slid e guitar on a $5 balsawood model using a triangle pick cut from a rusty co ffee can top and his Army issued Zippo. lighter as the slide.\n\nSlim firs t appeared on the music scene with the release of the only known protest r ecord by a veteran during the Vietnam War. The project was Merry Airbrakes \, a 1973 protest tinged LP with tracks Country Joe McDonald later covered . In the following 30 plus years Slim has been a truck driver\, forklift o perator\, sawmiller (where he lost a partial finger)\, firewood salesman\, collection agent\, funeral officiator and at times a small time criminal. Due to aforementioned criminality\, Slim was forced to flee Boston where he had played peace rallies\, sit-ins and rabbleroused musically with the likes of Bonnie Raitt. Recently Raitt singled out Slim to her audience as a living blues legend during a summer 2009 performance.\n\nFrom Boston Sli m landed in his current home state of Oklahoma farming watermelons – hen ce his stage name. Somewhere in those decades since Vietnam Slim completed two undergrad and a master’s degree\, started a family\, painted art an d joined Mensa\, the social networking group reserved for members with cer tified genius IQs. When he’s not on tour Slim loves to fish and garden.\ n\nThe big turning point was 2002 when Slim suffered a near fatal heart at tack. His brush with death gave him a new perspective on mortality\, direc tion and life ambitions and thus his second emergence as a performing musi cian. Eleven albums later he says\, “Everything I do now has a sharper p leasure to it. I’ve lived a fuller life than most people could in two. I f I go now\, I’ve got a good education\, I’ve lived on three continent s\, and I’ve played music with a bunch of immortal blues players. I’ve fought in a war and against a war. I’ve seen an awful lot and I’ve do ne an awful lot. If my plane went down tomorrow\, I’d go out on top.” And when you watch him perform\, you know every word is true.\n\nThroughou t his storied past\, it has always been truck driving that Slim returned t o. While trucking and hauling industrial waste for thankless bosses at hou rly wages to support himself and his family\, his id yearned for release o f the musician inside. In fact\, many of Slim’s current songs began a ca ppella in his rig keeping him awake and entertained. Slim’s music captur es those long hours of now and then\, finally and cathartically acquiescin g to his id.\n\n\nDISCOUNT CODE: WNYBS-WATERMELON\n\n\nTickets ->\; http s://events.eventgroove.com/event/Watermelon-Slim-74048\n\n\n ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://i0.wp.com/wnyblues.org/wp-content/upload s/2023/07/Watermellon-Slim-7-25-23-Fanatics.png?fit=360%2C225&ssl=1 CATEGORIES:Live Blues Music LOCATION:Fanatics\, 7281 West Main St\, Lima\, NY\, 14485\, United States GEO:42.904931;-77.612755 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=7281 West Main St\, Lima\, NY\, 14485\, United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=100;X-TITLE=Fanatics:geo:42.9049 31,-77.612755 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20230312T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR