If you asked William Elliott Whitmore who his toughest critics were, you wouldn’t get a normal response. It wouldn’t be a magazine, or a judgmental friend. According to Whitmore, he tries his new songs on whomever or whatever is around him at the time of conception, which in his case is his family’s horses and mule. Not exactly the conventional way to christen a song, but really, who could be more judgmental than a stubborn mule. If you make it take up its hoofs and bay away, you know you’ve got a real dud.

It was during this story that Whitmore was telling between songs when an audience member crudely asked what would happen if one of the equine decided to defecate when he was trying out one of his new songs. Damn city folk. Not missing a beat, though, Whitmore said he would chalk it up to nature and take it as a compliment because it meant the animal was comfortable.

These in-between conversations forced Whitmore the artist to became linked with Whitmore the man and it became undeniably obvious that the dude writes what he knows. He is from deep in the heart of the Heartland itself, a Lee County, Iowa boy bred to small town living and he’s now taking his small town atmosphere to the concrete jungle. He is a man who likes his horses and mule, gravel roads, and moonshine strong enough to numb the tongue. He prefers the tavern to the elementary school he was at reading to children earlier in the day. All the while telling these stories through song and banter, you got the feeling that he genuinely gave a shit about talking to you, even if you were but one in a crowd of hundreds. Every time the audience piped up with a comment or request, he was there with a witty comeback, an anecdote, a “thank you” to the crowd for being there and being so supportive.

Whether the crowd at the Redstone Room in Davenport, Iowa, was familiar with Whitmore or not, they definitely would get to know him by the end of the night. The standing room only crowd had been rather chatty in the minutes prior to Whitmore taking the stage, but after the first few strums of “Dry” and the first bellow of his voice, they were captured, caught in his web of banjo strings and overbearing voice. His voice is more soulful than a graveyard. It comes out of nowhere. It bellows and forces its way into your cranium filling it like helium forcing you to grab onto something before you float away. Some of the less experienced audience members, upon their first taste of his voice, and who were unfamiliar with him, immediately had to turn their head away from trivial tavern conversation and keep their attention transfixed on the stage, hypnotized until he snapped his fingers. But that wasn’t until he ran through selections mainly from the equally fantastic Song of the Blackbird and Ashes to Dust.

He took requests, he played banjo and guitar, and he stomped his boot with force on the hard floor, sending pulses all the way to the end of the long, thin venue and back again. It was just what you would expect from Whitmore, done only in the way that a man with dirt under his fingernails and moonshine on his breath would do. In “Gravel Road,” he sings “Life’s mysteries unravel when my tires hit that gravel and leave the paved road behind.” It’s a warm thought, isn’t it? There’s something soothing in that thought, just as in his music and voice. If you’ve never been to a farm, not to worry, William Elliott Whitmore will bring it with him. You don’t even have to worry about dealing with those stubborn mules and horses.

William Elliott Whitmore
Southern Records