Watermelon Slim & The Workers - The Wheel Man
ARTIST.....: Watermelon Slim & The Workers
TITLE......: The Wheel Man
LABEL......: Northern Blues
URL........: http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=7394941&BAB=Z
RIP DATE...: Apr-25-2007
STORE DATE.: Apr-17-2007
GENRE......: Blues
QUALITY....: VBR / 44.1Hz / Joint-Stereo
SIZE.......: 57,7 MB
Track Listing:
01 - The Wheel Man 04:21
02 - I've Got News 02:55
03 - Black Water 04:12
04 - Jimmy Bell 02:59
05 - Newspaper Reporter 05:56
06 - Drinking & Driving 02:18
07 - Fast Eddie 03:24
08 - Sawmill Holler 02:48
09 - Truck Driving Mama 02:52
10 - I Know One 02:23
11 - Got Love If You Want It 03:05
12 - Rattlesnake 03:21
13 - Peaches 03:39
14 - Judge Harsh Blues 03:22
─────
47:35 min
Release Notes:
The blues has always been an enigma. A music that expresses deeply
personal emotions, it does so with a well-worn collection of
repeated phrases, rhymes, and floating verses that are nothing
short of community property. It is also a music of constriction,
with a conservative set of stock progressions and riffs that make
innovations to the genre extremely difficult. The resulting
familiarity of all of this is what makes the blues what it is,
personal yet general, individual yet communally held, a music that
if it were any more blue collar it would be the deep blue sea
itself. How on earth does one bring something fresh to this genre
in the 21st century without tipping the whole cart over on its
side? Bill Homans, or Watermelon Slim, as he is known these days,
seems to have found an answer by looking backward all the way to
the field holler and looking over sideways to country music,
rolling it all up into a smart synthesis that sounds fresh and
sharp even though it is only a half-step removed from the sounds
of Charley Patton or Jimmie Rodgers. The Wheel Man, Slim's second
album for the Northern Blues imprint following 2006's magnificent
Watermelon Slim & the Workers, isn't as striking as the previous
offering, mainly because it is cut from the same exact cloth, but
it also isn't a fall off, either, and the two releases taken
together make a seamless arc. A former truck driver who just
happens to own several university degrees and is a member of
MENSA, Slim is his own walking enigma, and he manages to tread the
line amazingly between what is blue collar and what is blues
academia again on this album, beginning with the lead and title
track, a duet with Magic Slim (do two Slims make for one Extra
Large?) on the dilemma of making a sane life out of long-haul
trucking, which itself becomes a blues metaphor for steering
through life. "Sawmill Holler" is just that, a work holler that is
both a cathartic release and a way to focus in on the tasks at
hand. The harmonica and foot-stomp-driven "Jimmy Bell" is old-
fashioned storytelling done without any fancy modern recording
tricks. There are a pair of impressive blues covers here, too, an
Okie rendition of Slim Harpo's "Got Love If You Want It" and a
solo acoustic take on Furry Lewis' "Judge Harsh Blues." But it is
Slim's Oklahoma twang that binds everything together, and it
reminds that there was a time when the blues and country music
drank side by side from the same river. Two of the best songs
here, the wise, humorous, and carefully subtle "Drinking &
Driving" and the raggedly stomping "Rattlesnake," could be all
over country radio if the people who programmed that stuff really
had a clue to what real country music is. Jimmie Rodgers (who
never gets played on country radio -- even though without Rodgers
the format might not even exist) was the singing brakeman who
loved the blues, and Watermelon Slim, the singing truck driver who
also loves the blues, seem cut from the same cultural remnants.
Slim's smart enough to know it, too. Which is fine. He drives that
truck well.