William Elliott Whitmore Live!

William Elliott Whitmore
Beat Kitchen, Chicago
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

There was a point during William Elliott Whitmore’s Beat Kitchen set, five songs in to be exact, where the singer-songwriter decided to take a risk. He invited one of the drummers and the keyboard player from opening act FT (The Shadow Government) plus a bass player to join him onstage. Because The Shadow Government was on Whitmore’s current tour for only a handful of dates, the quartet had only played together a few days. “We’ll see if this works,” Whitmore told the crowd with a chuckle.

It did work. Quite well in fact. The makeshift band was loose, but never sloppy as it ran through “The Chariot,” “Red Buds,” and “Porchlight” among others. It worked, but Whitmore didn’t need it. In fact, as good as the players sounded together, it really served as a distraction from the real show — Whitmore alone on a stool, bleeding emotion all over his blues/bluegrass material.

With a brown fedora and a red button-up shirt, sleeves rolled to expose his heavily tattooed forearms, Whitmore didn’t look the part of a banjo-pluckin’, blues bellowin’ storyteller, but it only took a few seconds of opener “Dry” to realize the power of Whitmore’s performance: his voice. On record (his third Southern effort, Song Of The Blackbird, was released the day before this show) is an attraction, a gravely howl not unlike that of Tom Waits, but in person, it’s mesmerizing. Countless bluesmen would make a deal with the Devil for Whitmore’s gruff, grating voice, which he pushed to the edge of breaking on “Midnight” and “Burn My Body” and kept lubricated with plenty of whiskey shots and Pabst tallboys, courtesy of various fans. That voice was the perfect vehicle for the somber, fresh death of songs like “Rest His Soul” and “Diggin’ My Grave,” which Whitmore used to conclude the night.

Death may have hung over the stage like a menacing storm cloud, but from death comes rebirth for Whitmore; it’s the farmer in him. Hailing from rural Iowa, the musician is more than familiar with the farming cycle — the end of harvest season means the beginning of the next — and in fact, that is the predominant theme of Song Of The Blackbird. The most impressive thing about his Chicago show was his ability to paint such vivid pictures for a room full of big-city dwellers who probably had no idea about the blessing of knee-high corn by the fourth of July or eastern fields full of “tators.” But for just more than an hour the audience clung to every one of Whitmore’s words as he took them to the to the corn fields of South Western Iowa and to the banks of the Mississippi. When an act can take a crowd out of their element mentally, and dump them into a brand new environment, it’s a special thing – with or without a backing band.

— Trevor Fisher

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly