STILLWATER — The award-winning blues and roots artist Watermelon Slim will be performing a fund raiser for the Stillwater Blues Fest on Jan. 9 at the City of Stillwater Community Center from 8 to 10:30 p.m.

Tickets are $10 each and may be purchased online at tickets.stillwater.org or at the box office, located at 315 W. 8th (corner of 8th and Duck Streets). Office hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets will be also be available at the door as space permits.

Watermelon Slim and his band, The Workers, won two 2008 Blues Music Award Awards (Best Blues Album of the Year and Best Blues Band of the Year) for the CD release "The Wheel Man."

Blues Fest coordinator Gloria Short said, "This is will be a great show, and it’s a wonderful way to support the arts."

The Memphis Flyer led its terrific CD review with the question "Does anyone in modern pop music have a more intriguing biography than Bill "Watermelon Slim" Homans?" Slim was born in Boston and raised in North Carolina listening to his maid sing John Lee Hooker and other blues songs around the house. His father was a progressive attorney and ex-freedom rider and his brother is now a classical musician. Slim dropped out of Middlebury College 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.

In the following 30 plus years Slim has been a truck driver, forklift operator, sawmiller (where he lost part of his finger), firewood salesman, collection agent, and even officiated funerals. At times he got by as a small time criminal. At one point he was forced to flee Boston where he played peace rallies, sit-ins and rabbleroused musically with the likes of Bonnie Raitt.

He ended up farming watermelons in Oklahoma – hence his stage name and current home base. Somewhere in those decades Slim completed two undergrad degrees in history and journalism.

In 2002 Slim suffered a near fatal heart attack. His brush with death gave him a new perspective on mortality, direction and life ambitions. He says, "Everything I do now has a sharper pleasure to it. I've lived a fuller life than most people could in two. If I go now, I've got a good education, I've lived on three continents, 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 done an awful lot. If my plane went down tomorrow, I'd go out on top."

If it's any indication from raving reviews and features in Guitar One, HARP, Blues Revue, Toronto Star, Chicago Sun-Times, NPR, House of Blues Radio Hour, BBC's World Service Programme, XM Satellite Radio and others, Watermelon Slim may have finally settled in on his chosen vocation.

For more information or to purchase tickets, contact (405) 533-8433 or gshort@stillwater.org