Bill Homans, aka “Watermelon Slim,” was grabbing the attention of jaded critics before this record, and this record is a big step forward. He's taken his previously outstanding sound, and plugged it in, filled it with higher octane fuel, put it on steroids or [insert your own analogy for expanding the power of something here].

Basically, he sounds like a mush-mouthed cracker singing and playing the blues. At first listen, one thinks, “21st Century Ronnie Hawkins,” “21st Century Jerry Lee Lewis” or “21st Century Billy C. Riley,” but he tacks some elements onto their basic bandstand strategy. First, those ol' boys just thought they were being unabashedly, stereotypically trailer trash when they wore coonskin caps on stage and married their underage cousins, but they couldn't hold a used corncob candle to Watermelon Slim's song, “Dumpster Blues,” in which, from the viewpoint of the dump truck driver, he sings, “This load is rotten, smells like the devil's bottom hole / I got to dump this at the landfill, to save my dispatcher's soul.”

Second, the rockabilly rednecks of the '50s were promoting some of the questionable outcomes of the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electricity to the rural South; they misused their amplifiers, hitting upon the happily primal rock and roll sounds of feedback, distortion and grunge when their original purpose was just to turn up to the level of heavy-handed, self-taught drummers. Slim finds a delicate pocket for his harmonica that's as barbaric as anything on record, but still sends out discernible single notes at need, and, man, can he play ferocious harp ... like Howlin' Wolf if he'd actually picked up technique and style as well as just rudiments when he got those Mississippi saxophone lessons from his brother in-law, Rice Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson 2).

Third, Watermelon Slim can write lyrics and music. These aren't just bleary memories of whiskey-burned synapse firings from some guys with half the vocabulary of Koko the gorilla; these are picaresque, Faulkner-esque tales of life on the dirt road written by Koko the gorilla.

Stirring these general elements together, “Watermelon Slim and the Workers” serves up a fourteen-course (14 cuts) meal that will be equally filling and tasty to hardcore blues fans, followers of Southern Culture on the Skids and everyone in between. If this record doesn't make it, it won't be because the artist, the studio sidemen, the engineers, the label and this critic haven't done everything in their power to let potential listeners know how good Watermelon Slim is.

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