A blues musician with a master’s degree in history who spent 30 years hauling hazardous waste in an 18-wheeler and once tried to farm artichokes in Oklahoma. This deep dive follows William P. Homans III, better known as Watermelon Slim, born in Boston in 1949 to a prominent civil rights lawyer, raised partly in North Carolina, and enrolled at Middlebury College before dropping out to enlist for Vietnam. Severely ill in a military hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, he taught himself to play a balsa wood guitar strung with rusty wire, laid flat on his lap, using a Zippo lighter as a slide, forging the left-handed, upside-down Delta slide style he is known for today.

The episode covers his return as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his raw 1973 anti-war album Merry Airbrakes, his 1979 move to Pushmataha County, Oklahoma where only watermelons survived and his stage name was born in 1980, and the decades of long-haul trucking during which he earned degrees from the University of Oregon and Oklahoma State and formed Fried Okra Jones with two philosophy professors. After a 2002 national release, Big Shoes to Fill, and a serious heart attack, he used vacation days for a 2003 English tour and quit trucking in 2004 to tour with The Workers. What followed was a 2005 W.C. Handy nomination for Up Close and Personal, Best Blues Band and CD wins in 2008 for The Wheel Man, 17 Blues Foundation nominations, the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame, and a number seven Billboard blues chart placement for Church of the Blues in 2019.

• How balsa wood and rusty strings forced an aggressive attack that became his signature
• What microtones are and why a metal slide mimics the crying human voice
• Why a history degree deepened rather than diluted his working-class authenticity
• The Bonnie Raitt connection and their shared idol Mississippi Fred McDowell
• His solitary pilgrimage to serenade Fred McDowell’s grave