New festival inspired by delta blues heartland

When Watermelon Slim says, “I’m just waiting to die,” it’s a little startling.

Then he adds, “I’ve had a heart attack and a stroke and a broken back and several other times when death has walked up to me and taken a good hard look, touched me and walked on.”

Near-death experiences are always something to consider when sizing up the credentials of anyone who sings the blues. This is from the same guy who belted out “I’m too toothless to chew” in the song “Hard Times.”

Watermelon Slim grew up as Bill Homans in Asheville, N.C. After “raising too much hell” as a kid, his parents sent him to the Lennox School for Boys in Massachusetts. He wouldn’t learn to play the guitar until Vietnam, where he bought “a $5 balsa-wood guitar at the commissary” while he was laid up sick. His nickname would arrive when he returned stateside and started growing and trucking watermelons in Oklahoma.

Today, armed with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, a master’s degree in history and a handful of blues music awards, the Watermelon man tours the country when he’s not at home in Clarksdale, Miss.

Before he blows his harp at the inaugural Coahoma to Sonoma County Blues Festival this weekend, Watermelon Slim took a break to chat about gourds, teeth and singing in the choir:

Q: How’s the summer treating you so far?
A: It’s been good. I’m not out on a farm or anything, but I do have a garden patch in back and it’s been a good year, especially for the tomatoes.

Q: Do you have any watermelons?
A: No. Not this year. But I have been juicing whole watermelons. I have virtually no teeth left — always keep your smile, it’s what’s going to make you your living in this world. Now I don’t have a smile any more, but I have a food processor in the shed. And I turn that little sucker on and juice whole large watermelons at a time. It takes me half an hour to juice a whole large watermelon.

Q: Were there times in your life when you thought you would just keep on living the “Hard Times” and never get a chance to write about it and sing about it?
A: There is a time and place for everything. The psychologist Carl Jung called that synchronicity, when time and circumstance and people line up to create something significant. Take, for instance, I never picked a guitar with my fingers because I always had too many teeth and I would bite my fingernails. Now I have virtually no teeth and I carry around automatic guitar picks on my fingers. They’re also perfect CD openers. God didn’t mean for me to sell CDs until I’d almost run out of teeth and I could open CDs for people.

Q: At least you’ve got a good sense of humor about it all.
A: I have to. It’s too late for me to change it.

Q: In the song “And When I Die,” you carry the whole thing a capella in this really raw and honest voice. That takes a lot of courage. Take me back to when you first started singing.
A: I started singing when I was just a little boy in the choir. My mom said, “You can go to church, but you gotta stick with it.” I found not only could I sing everything, but I also realized I could sing harmony.

Q: What did your mom think of your voice?
A: At various times she was enthralled with it, supportive of it and eventually she said, “You cannot be going out and trying to make a living with this.” Of all the things I could have been in my life.

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter @becksay.

COAHOMA TO SONOMA COUNTY BLUES FESTIVAL
When: Noon to 8 p.m. Sunday and 4:20 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday
Where: Lagunitas Brewing Company, 1280 N. McDowell Blvd., Petaluma
Talent: Watermelon Slim, Lightnin’ Malcolm, David Jacobs-Strain, Coyote Slim and the Coahoma to Sonoma All-Star Band with Sarah Baker, Steve Pile, Donny Maderos and Gary Silva.
Tickets: Free.
Note: All the free tickets for the Monday show have already been handed out so it’s officially “sold-out.”
Information: www.krsh.com/Mississippi-Blues-Experience/13671813

When the Sonoma County Blues Festival shut down in 2011 after three decades, director Bill Bowker immediately started brainstorming other ways to bring live blues to diehard fans in the region.

The KRSH DJ remembered what it was like a decade ago when Geyserville blues legend Charlie Musselwhite took him to the Mississippi Delta for the first time.

“There was just something magical about the place,” Bowker says. “You could feel it and I just fell in love with it — it felt like home.”

The town they stayed in was Clarksdale, in the heart of Coahoma County. It’s where John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner and Sam Clark were born and where Muddy Waters was raised. It’s not far from the spot where Robert Johnson once stood at the crossroads and made a deal with the devil. These days, it’s where actor Morgan Freeman runs a blues club called Ground Zero and where thousands of blues tourists converge every year looking for mecca.

Over the years, Bowker and his good friend Charles Evans, a Sonoma County developer and lifelong supporter of the arts, would return to Clarksdale again and again. Evans eventually bought over a dozen buildings in Clarksdale’s dilapidated downtown, along with the charming Clark House bed-and-breakfast.

A few months ago, while sitting on the front porch of the Clark House, Bowker finally came up with an idea for a new blues festival.

“What if we did something where we found musicians in the Delta, who are playing Mississippi or Hill Country blues, and brought them to Sonoma County?”

He happened to be sitting on the porch with Lagunitas Brewing Company marketing manager Ron Lindenbusch. With Lagunitas opening a new bottling plant in Chicago and expanding distribution to the East Coast and the South, into states like Missisissippi, the idea of teaming up on a Mississippi blues event by way of a Sonoma blues festival was a win-win.

“Then we came up with the name ’Coahoma to Sonoma’ and that was it,” says Bowker.

After this weekend’s inaugural festival at Lagunitas Brewing Company stages headliners Lightnin’ Malcolm and Watermelon Slim, “I just hope it becomes an annual event and gets bigger and bigger every year,” he says.
— John Beck