won in The 6th annual Independent Music Awards for Best Blues Album. Watermelon Slim & The Workers were also nominated for Blues Album of the year for The Wheel Man in the 7th annual Independent Music Awards. In 2007, Homans made the CD The Wheel Man, which was nominated for another six Blues Music Awards. At the awards ceremony in 2008, Homans and his band won the award for Best Blues Band of 2007, and The Wheel Man was awarded Best Blues CD of 2007. Besides that, Homans won the Maple Blues Award for B.B. King International Entertainer. The Wheel Man also was No. 1 Blues Album in England's Mojo Magazine blues CD poll for the second year in a row. In 2008, The Workers recorded their third CD for Toronto's NorthernBlues record label, No Paid Holidays. Homans was also inducted into the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame at this time. In 2009, this CD was nominated for another four Blues Music Awards, for a total of seventeen awards from the Blues Foundation. A few months later, Escape From the Chicken Coop, Homans' first country-and-western CD recorded in Nashville with Paul Franklin, Darrell Scott and other top Nashville session players, was released on NorthernBlues. Future releases will include another Nashville record, reflecting Homans' North Carolina Grand Ole Opry roots, an acoustic duo CD featuring Honour Havoc, and blues CDs with Mississippi bluesmen James "Super Chikan" Johnson and Robert "The Wolfman" Belfour. In 1972-3, Homans met country star Bonnie Raitt at one of her performances. Both Raitt and Homans shared the same musical hero, Mississippi Fred McDowell, an established star who had actually been Raitt's teacher. In 1979, Homans dropped in on one of Raitt's shows. The reporter covering the show for the Norman Transcript wrote as much about Homans as he did about the star. Raitt and Homans both attended the unveiling of a Mississippi Blues Trail marker honoring the late McDowell. Later, Homan went alone to McDowell's grave and serenaded his mentor, acknowledging the debt he owed the man who started Watermelon Slim on the road to success. Homans is a graduate of Lenox School for Boys, a boarding school in Lenox, MA. Homans has a bachelor's degree in journalism and history from the University of Oregon, and a master's degree in history from Oklahoma State University. Before dropping out to enlist in the Vietnam War he had attended