Oklahoma Rock Newsblog

Today we bring you one of the more identifiable songs about 9/11 - Watermelon Slim’s “Red, White & Blues”, off his 2003 album Big Shoes to Fill.

DOWNLOAD: Watermelon Slim - “Red, White & Blues”

Below is an excerpt from BluesWax’s interview with Slim, regarding the song:

BW: The most moving song I’ve heard written about 9/11 is your “Red, White and Blues” off your previous Southern records release; some of the best descriptions of all of our reactions to the event in that song. Tell us about most folk’s reaction to that song live?

Slim: “The Red, White and Blues” was written two days after the attack, and Fried Okra Jones first performed it the second week after that at the Stillwater Bikes ‘n Blues Festival. Lotta Vietnam vets in that crowd, of course, and it went over very big with them, given the atmosphere of the time. Naturally, much has changed since then. Our president has launched us into exactly the wrong war at the wrong time. He seems to have completely forgotten that it was al-Qaida that struck us in the World Trade Center twice, the Pentagon, the U.S.S. Cole, and plenty of other provocations. I am going to have to write some sort of sequel that stands up well to Willie Nelson’s “Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?” I always make sure to say, either before or after, “God Bless the United States of America.” That seems to make almost anything politically difficult go down easier. I’m not being cynical about it; I love my country, I volunteered for Vietnam service. But I will never tolerate liars and greedheads, and that’s what’s in the White House now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Watermelon Slim, free mp3s. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.