Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Imagine an evening out, surrounded by friends and fellow music lovers, sharing good conversation, and a passion for music in a smoke-free environment.
 
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An Intimate evening with Watermelon Slim
with
John Long opening, Saturday, March 28th

Where:  The Stone Church 4225 W. 5th St. Tulsa, 74127
Time:  Doors open at 7pm, show starts 7:30pm
Suggested Donation: $20 at the door and (DOS) DAY OF SHOW and $15 in advance and through PayPal.  Click button below to make donation through paypal.
RSVP required, as seating is limited.  Your paypal donation will serve as your RSVP.  If you plan to pay at the door, please RSVP to scottaypoet@gmail.com
Food:  We will provide some finger food and beverages for this event, but any food contribution from you would be much appreciated.    Also, feel free to BYOB

 

 

Sponsored by
The Artery,
House Concerts Unlimited
and supported by
AHHA
 

    

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WATERMELON SLIM - ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

“The most exciting and authentic blues performer I’ve heard in years.” A.W., Paste Magazine

2x Winner: 2008 Blues Music Award Band of the Year and Album of the Year
2x Winner: 2006 & 2007 MOJO Magazine’s #1 Blues Album of the Year
Winner: 6th Annual Independent Music Awards Blues Album of the Year

ARTIST BIO: An ever-expanding career of ramshackle grandeur.  Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans has built a remarkable reputation with his raw, impassioned 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.” Paste 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.”

Slim 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 on a fencing scholarship but left early to enlist for Vietnam. While laid up in a Vietnam hospital bed he taught himself upside-down left-handed slide guitar on a $5 balsawood model using a triangle pick cut from a rusty coffee can top and his Army issued Zippo. lighter as the slide.

Slim first appeared on the music scene with the release of the only known protest record 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 operator, 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.

From Boston Slim landed in his current home state of Oklahoma farming watermelons – hence his stage name. Somewhere in those decades since Vietnam Slim completed two undergrad and a master’s degree, started a family, painted art and joined Mensa, the social networking group reserved for members with certified genius IQs. When he’s not on tour Slim loves to fish and garden.

 


Biography

John Long was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1950 and was first exposed to the music he’d make his life’s work not long after.  His mother played several stringed instruments and supplemented the household income by teaching local guitarists.  By the late 1950s John was absorbing the sounds of Jimmy Reed, Buster Brown, Muddy Waters, Lightnin ’ Hopkins, Junior Parker, and all the rest of the R&B and jump blues of the day, and working on recreating those sounds with his own guitar.  By the early 1960s he was playing professionally in local bands, and digging deeper into the blues, through Muddy, Wolf, and Elmore, to Tampa Red, Peetie Wheatstraw , Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell, Lonnie Johnson and others.  As Long immersed himself in the pre-war, acoustic blues era, he began to find a home stylistically, and started writing his own original music, inspired in large part by his brother Claude, whom he still credits as his biggest influence.