Podcast: A look back at Watermelon Slim’s trucking blues live in Nashville, Tuscaloosa

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Updated Mar 22, 2015

Watermelon Slim, live in Nashville

Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans, pictured above during a 2010 performance at Carol Ann’s in Nashville, Tenn., electrified audiences that year with the release of his “Escape from the chicken coop” record of trucking blues tunes. Perhaps more importantly, as longtime readers will remember, his tour brought him quite close to home for Overdrive‘s editorial staff — right into the HQ, where he performed his solo slide-acoustic show.

Putting together some updates to our Music to Truck By playlist this past week (catch it below as well), I remembered my own talks with him at the Nashville show. In the podcast here, you can hear among other things his a capella and impromptu parking-lot rendition of the trucking-songs classic recorded by the Willis Brothers in 1964, “Give Me Forty Acres (To Turn This Rig Around.”

Some guys can turn it on a dime, or turn it right downtown / But I need forty acres to turn this rig around…

Also in the podcast, the former interstate commercial hauler Slim tells the origin story of his signature “Blue Freightliner” song — and more. Kick back and enjoy the show…

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