With a voice that sounds like the reincarnation of an old gospel preacher from the 1920s and a fascination with sin, death, and redemption to match, William Elliott Whitmore is one of the most unique artists to emerge on the Americana scene in years. The son of a farmer and raised on a horse farm on the banks of the Mississippi River outside of Keokuk, IA, Whitmore's songs have a stark universality that is sketched out with minimal instrumentation, usually just a banjo or guitar and a smattering of percussion. His voice is the one Tom Waits has been after for years (imagine a cross between Captain Beefheart and Dock Boggs), and his folk- and blues-inflected songs feel like they've been left out in the rain for months, weathered and tightened to the snapping point. Whitmore released Hymns for the Hopeless on Southern in 2003, followed by Ashes to Dust, also on Southern, in 2005. Whitmore appeared on the 2006 compilation CD/DVD entitled Let's Be Active, along with two other artists. In 2006 he released a third album on Southern, the characteristically stark Song of the Blackbird. Animals in the Dark followed in 2009.
William Elliott Whitmore - Hymns for the Hopeless (2003)
Cita:
William Elliott Whitmore has the ancient sounding voice of an 80-year-old Appalachian moonshiner, and while he is yet to turn thirty, his bleak and death-haunted tales are full of the kind of regrets that only a long life full of loss and struggle can validate. On Hymns for the Hopeless, his debut release, Whitmore mines a strip of narrow Americana that conjures Dock Boggs more than it does Ralph Stanley, and if this isn't exactly the blues, well, it sure isn't bluegrass, either. Actually, the simple, stark three-note melodies of Whitmore's dirges sound more like church hymns than anything else, and his ragged crow-croak of a voice (which makes Tom Waits sound glib and Leonard Cohen sound like a pop diva) comes from a place where the blues and gospel first converged into country. From the first track, the unaccompanied "Cold and Dead," Whitmore begins an unrelenting search for redemption and reaches out for death as the only true reckoning of a man's life, and if he seems to share little of a street preacher's faith in a paradise beyond that reckoning, he seems to reach out for it anyway, and by the album's closer, the full-tilt gospel romp of "Our Paths Will Cross Again," he seems to suggest that yes, there's hope, even for the hopeless. This is timeless stuff, delivered in stark arrangements of just banjo or guitar, with occasional touches of junkyard percussion, and throughout there is Whitmore's harrowing, convincing voice that sounds like it has crossed the River Styx and returned to preach to the living. If there is a problem with this striking album, it is in a lack of variety, as each song unwinds at the same slow pace, and occasionally Whitmore simply tries too hard and loses believability, as he does with "From the Cell Door to the Gallows," which, although striking, suffers from an obvious case of jailhouse noir, and it is the lone track where Whitmore fails to completely inhabit his voice. In the end, this is an amazing debut, a country album that is as far from today's hat acts as a hat can get, an album of rare artistic courage, one that faces death, embraces it, and comes out the other end in a gospel hoedown. Hymns for the Hopeless is a brilliant beginning for William Elliott Whitmore. -- AMG
1. Cold and Dead
2. Sometimes Our Dreams Float Like Anchors
3. Does Me No Good
4. Lord Only Knows
5. Pine Box
6. From the Cell Door to the Gallows
7. Burn My Body
8. Our Paths Will Cross Again
mp3 VBR~192kpbs | 45MB | 35:00 min.
Country-Folk, Neo-Traditional Folk, Folk-Blues, Blues Gospel, Americana
Cita:
William Elliott Whitmore's stunning debut album, Hymns for the Hopeless, a death-haunted collection of country-folk dirges sung in an ancient croak of a voice, begged the question, if an acceptance of death is both redemption and deliverance from a life of pain, struggle and regret, where to next? With Ashes to Dust, his second album, Whitmore makes it clear that the answer is simply more of the same. Like the first offering, this release practices a stern folk minimalism, with Whitmore's whiskey gargle of a voice delivering slow-burning gospel sermons to the sparse accompaniment of banjo or guitar, and when the occasional electric slide guitar enters, it seems to come from the next century, so insular is the tone here. This is country music that is still attached at the hip to gospel and the stern Baptist church hymns that are tailored to the three-note vocal range of the everyman, and Whitmore's astounding voice makes it all stick in the mind like a cautionary tale. But while most of Ashes to Dust could fit seamlessly alongside Hymns for the Hopeless, there are some subtle differences that make this album at least a partial step farther down the road to redemption. Death is still the dominate force here, and it sits atop the sequence like a huge shadow in songs like "The Day the End Finally Came," "Diggin' My Grave," and "The Buzzards Won't Cry," but Whitmore has decided to embrace hope and love in the fiercely romantic "When Push Comes to Shove," the stunning train song "Lift My Jug (Song for Hub Cale)," and the masterful portrait of his farmer father that closes the album, "Porchlight." These three songs in particular lift the album out of its harrowing fascination with death and allow some light in on the proceedings. Redemption, Whitmore appears to be saying, just might be attainable in the here and now after all. Ashes to Dust is another powerful album from one of the brightest talents on the Americana scene, one who understands that country isn't about how you wear your hat, it's about how you handle the inevitable. -- AMG
1. Midnight 3:34
2. The Day the End Finally Came 4:18
3. When Push Comes to Love 3:50
4. Diggin' My Grave 4:06
5. The Buzzards Won't Cry 2:22
6. Sorest of Eyes 3:30
7. Lift My Jug (Song for Hub Cale) 3:36
8. Gravel Road 3:52
9. Porchlight 5:47
William Elliott Whitmore - Song of the Blackbird (2006)
mp3 VBR~192 kpbs | 42MB | 31:07 min. Americana, Neo-Traditional Folk, Alternative Singer/ Songwriter, Folk-Blues, Blues Gospel
Cita:
William Elliott Whitmore hasn't changed one iota for Song of the Blackbird, the third in a stylistic trilogy that began with 2003's Hymns for the Hopeless and continued in 2005 with Ashes to Dust. He's still fascinated by death and the re-examination of a life lived that death forces into play, and he still approaches his songs on a sparse, rustic level, sounding very much like an old Appalachian banjo player who's been reading Nietzsche while throwing down shots of bootleg moonshine. Whitmore's remarkable croak of a voice makes all of this work, and if that voice and the general dour, slow-paced feel of his songs makes him seem like a one-trick pony, well, that pony knows one hell of a trick. Song of the Blackbird doesn't set any new dishes out on the table, consisting of Whitmore singing over his own banjo or acoustic guitar accompaniment, for the most part (some moody drums and organ creep into a couple of the songs), and life doesn't seem to have been any easier on this latest bunch of Whitmore's hardscrabble characters, but while it's easy to view him as a scribe of the dire and the dying, there's a stubborn kind of faith at the root of his songs, a sort of unsaid hope in redemption and renewal that puts tremendous faith in the rhythm of the soil. Things are born, they live, they die, and the whole cycle renews. In the final song here, "Everyday," the sun comes up over the field to the east and then a verse or two later it sets over the field to the west. That's something, Whitmore is saying, that you can count on everyday. For all of their dark and desperate fears, the characters in these songs all cling to that notion of renewal, and Song of the Blackbird, although it moves track to track like a dirge stuck in a single key, is full of the hope for redemption, and there is a fervent and stubborn joy here, buried in the darkness. --- AMG
# 1. Dry
# 2. The Chariot
# 3. One Man's Shame
# 4. Rest His Soul
# 5. And Then the Rains Came
# 6. Lee County Flood
# 7. Take it on the Chin
# 8. Red Buds
# 9. Everyday
[Discografia] William Elliott Whitmore
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