Watermelon Slim

Perhaps I was expecting too much from a blues-singer and former truck-driver called Watermelon Slim (yes, that's his stage name).

He has the image, the life-experience and the credentials (he's won many blues awards), but his slide guitar-playing was a little too heavy and repetitive, for my taste, and his versions of songs by Howlin' Wolf and Mississippi Fred McDowell didn't quite cut it for me, in terms of subtlety. Here is Watermelon Slim's Smokestack Lightnin'.

A charming man, real name Bill Homans, he lives in Clarksdale, Mississippi (formerly in North Carolina and Oklahoma), and he seemed pleased to chat to someone who knows the town a little, places like Hopson's Plantation Commissariat and the Riverside Hotel (still run by Rat Hill), where Bessie Smith died (it was once a hospital). He played to a full house, and was warmly received by a Dorset audience last night.