SOUTHERN | william elliott whitmore

william elliott whitmore

Hymns For The Hopeless CD/LP (28106)

Bejeezus Magazine

Issue 5

William Elliott Whitmore - Hymns For the Hopeless (Southern Records)

This is truly one of the most original albums I have heard. To hear him initially you get the feeling that you're listening to a Robert Johnson recording. William as such a command over his voice that he effortlessly is able to pull you in the world he creates. With the sensibilities of a mountain man and a voice that rivals Tom Waits' gravelly baritone, Whitmore has created his own genre of Gospel/Blues/Bluegrass music. Buy this album and send him a thank you note. - Brian

Chicago Reader

December, 05 2003 | By Monica Kendrick

On his last tour, Whitmore was backed by members of Ten Grand, whose own promising career ended with the untimely death of front man Matt Davis. I mention that because his death will probably be on your mind throughout Whitmore's set: on his new Hymns for the Hopeless (Southern) he confronts the hillbilly death ballad all alone, armed only with banjo, harmonica, and his cracked, throaty croak. Whitmore, an Iowa native, is indeed a bona fide hayseed, but that alone doesn't explain his primeval hyperawareness of mortality, and he puts across songs like 'Cold and Dead,' 'Pine Box,' 'From the Cell Door to the Gallows,' and 'Burn My Body' without a shred of camp or comforting pop distance. Maybe death does have a sense of irony, but I've never heard of the reaper ever being fended off by a smirk or a sophisticated arrangement.

Wire

November 2003 | by Tom Ridge

With a parched and weathered voice backed by sparse arrangements of guitar and banjo working through songs of death, Whitmore sounds like the real thing. From the opening a cappella of "Cold and Dead" to the gospel handclaps of "Our Paths Will Cross Again," this is American folk music stripped to its basics but freed of any stultifying reverence. Whitmore writes originals, which sound timeless in a voice, which doesn't fit his comparative youth. It ought to come across as unbearably contrived, especially when you consider that Whitmore was raised on a farm on the banks of the Mississippi, but these songs speak for themselves.

Time Out New York

November 6, 2003 | by Steve Smith

There's a good reason why you won't find a photograph of singer and banjo picker William Elliot Whitmore anywhere on "Hymns for the Hopeless," his world-weary debut release. When introducing a sonorous voice the color of whiskey, tobacco and peat, why reveal that it emanates from a young, tattooed former punk-band roadie smitten with Ralph Stanley and the Loving Brothers?

Whitmore's singing is homely and heartbreaking, whether it's accompanied by a glowering industrial rumble ("Cold and Dead") or the kind of ragtag junkyard band favored by Tom Waits ("Sometimes Our Dreams Float Like Anchors"). It's a good thing, too: His material-original songs in rural folk, blues and country-gospel styles could easily lapse into parody, were it not for the gravelly veracity in his delivery. Whitmore doesn't attempt the deceptively complex banjo plucking favored by genuine rural blues men; instead, he accompanies his parables and graveyard laments with a folky strum that's no effective for its simplicity.

Only at the very end of the of the disc does Whitmore tip his hand: He follows the fruity vocal harmonies, bass-drum kicks and revival-tent air of "Our Paths Will Cross Again Someday" with a hidden epilogue, in which a faux-ghetto MC lauds him with platitudes like "Heads ain't ready." Great to know that Whitmore doesn't take himself too seriously, but it's hard not to resent having the album's spell so rudely broken

Rockpile

November/December 2003 | by Brian Baker

"Hymns for the Hopeless" lurches open appropriately with William Elliot Whitmore croaking out the a Capella Ralph Stanley homage, "Cold and Dead," which sets the standard for the next seven tracks. Whitmore's bleak, indie country soundscape suggests Steve Earle with a rapturous Tom Waits fixation and a burning need to translate it into a gospel context. Whitmore knows the country tradition well - he covers the dead lover angle in "Pine Box" and the jailhouse beatification of "From the Cell Door to the Gallows." He Keeps things sparse until the relatively muscular "Burn My Body," when the organ offers the congregation a chance to stand and sway. Like Gillian Welch, William Elliot Whitmore makes something compelling and contemporary from some relatively antique building blocks.

Punk Planet

November/December 2003 | by Ari Joffe

Call it what you will, "alternative country," "neo-bluegrass" or "delta blues," but William Elliot Whitmore's "Hymns for the Hopeless" is truly the epitome of "soul music" - music that speaks to, about and for the human condition. This album is an extremely impressive mixture of haunting murder ballads, hoodoo blues shuffles and hopeless sinner laments, all propelled by Whitmore's gruff, world-weary voice and bare-bones instrumentation (banjo, slide guitar and the occasional handclaps, tambourine and organ). All the songs have a time worn, Southern Gothic quality. The astonishing "Pine Box" sounds like an old Stanley Brothers tune, and "Does Me No Good" and "Sometimes Our Dreams Float Like Anchors" could've spawned from the experiences of a nomadic blues man during the Reconstruction. The title kind of says it all. These are truly hymns for hopeless: songs of praise, faith and longing for those struggling souls devoid of easy answers or paths to early fulfillment.

Omaha Pulp Critic's Choice

November 27 - December 4, 2003 | By Nick Turner

Bluegrass and punk rock really aren't so different. Both are looked down on by cosmopolites, and they're both capable of heavy lamenting. It was just a matter of time before someone tried to mash them together. Enter Will Whitmore, the gritty-voiced, tattooed banjo player whose music exists somewhere between the mohawk and the mullet.

Whitmore grew up on a horse farm in a small town on the Mississippi River. After leaving the nest, he became a roadie for Ten Grand, and Iowa-based hardcore punk band. Ten Grand had a habit of blowing through its set in about 20 minutes, so Whitmore took it upon himself to fill the gaps. His grainy, fatalist portrait of Appalachia was like a shot of whiskey to the rowdy crowds; his stripped-down style captured the vexed sentimentality conjoining junkyard blues and industrial hardcore.

Whitmore's tobacco-flavored voice is reminiscent of the mature Johnny Cash, and he lists Minor Threat, Ralph Stanley and Captain Beefheart among his inspirations. Whitmore signed to the indie label Southern Records after the O Brother, Where Art Thou craze made Southern twangs trendy, and he embarked soon after on a European tour. His latest album, Hymns for the Hopeless, blends sparse instrumentation with struggling characters and doomed narratives. Whitmore is an earthworn supplicant with musical dirt under his fingernails. He'll play the 49'r, Monday, Dec. 1 at 10 p.m.

Magnet

November/December 2003 | by Ashlea Halpern

Pity the cynic who tosses this gem in the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" knockoff pile. "Hymns for the Hopeless" is a tribute to - or, more correctly, a continuation of bluegrass gospel and Appalachian traditions. Everything on this debut bears William Elliot Whitmore's signature, though most of his songs sound a century old - a battery of folk dirges handed down through generations of mandolins, fiddles, banjos, dulcimers and washtubs. Whitmore picks up where Gus Cannon laid down his comb and tissue paper, uniting sparse instrumentation (thunderous handclapping is about as raucous as it gets) with his tobacco-charred, coal miner's hack. From the sound of it, Whitmore has blood on his hands and tales a mile tall. "Cold and Dead" pitches his whiskey-rot voice against a whistling wind as he draws hard and hoarse on themes of love, death, religion and murder. His sore heart is sick of trying, his palms too blistered to swing an ax any longer. Where are the ghosts of time past (Ernest Tubb, the Kentucky Colonels, Bill Monroe, the Whites)? Mississippi be damned, Whitmore is singing the rural blues better than the lot of them.

Houston Press - Racket

November, 20 2003 | By John Nova Lomax

"Texas rules. I always have a good time down there. I wish I was there right now."

So says 25-year-old singer-songwriter, banjo player/guitarist William Elliott Whitmore. And what's more, he's probably telling the truth. When you're in a phone booth in Minneapolis and it's 33 degrees, you really do wish you were in Texas, where November has been freakishly warm.

Not that Whitmore is unaccustomed to cold weather. For Whitmore, home is in and around Montrose. Not the one here- the one in Iowa, the Lee County seat, across the Mississippi from Illinois and a few miles north of Missouri. Whitmore calls himself a hillbilly, and the idea of an Iowa hillbilly seems strange. Where are all the hills for all the billies?

In Lee County, he says. "A lot of Iowa is flat, but where I'm from is really hilly. It reminds me of the Shire or somethin'- it's really beautiful. I'm much more influenced by my surroundings than I am by any kind of music. Hell, I listen to more hip-hop than I do country these days."

That's just one of the several shocks you get with this guy- one of the most talented and compelling under-30 roots musicians in America today. I got a Whitmore demo CD back in March, sometime around South By Southwest, and it was the biggest surprise of the whole event. You hear his voice- a Fighting Cock and Camel-shorty-stained beast of an instrument- and banjo playing that sounds like it slipped through a crevice in time from the 1930s, and you imagine a tattooed 50-year-old ex-con sitting on a trailer porch on some backwoods West Virginia hilltop. A quick Internet search turns up the fact that Whitmore is half that age, and in his songs name-check not the Blue Ridge Mountains but weird little Iowa villages. He does have a bunch of tats, though.

Then there's the fact that he wrote many of the excellent songs on that demo when he was still in his teens. And also that hardly anybody knows about him right now- his gig here is at the Austin House, a DIY underground punk venue in the Museum District.

That's right- this banjo picker's plucking is at a punk place. Though the No Depression crowd would definitely dig Whitmore, he's not especially interested in going that route, much less through mainstream Nashville channels. Besides, the punk stuff comes to him naturally. After the country music his parents gave him, and the hip-hop of N.W.A. and Public Enemy that his siblings dug, the punk of bands like Minor Threat was his third love.

"Around age 14 I started reading Thrasher magazine and skateboarding stuff. When you're livin' in a cornfield- I know a lot of Midwestern hillbilly kids say this- but I had no window to the outside world and Thrasher magazine was it. So I started getting into punk, but man, I love country music and hillbilly music too, and I thought, man, if I'm ever gonna do anything in this biz it'll be through the punk scene, not the country scene."

Who could blame him? Country's losing its hold on the youth, and who wants to be a museum piece for a bunch of old folks, a nice young man with and old soul and a big voice? Not Whitmore. "The kids are hungrier- and it is kids," he says. "If you go to a country place, it's middle-aged folks and that's awesome and I love it- I've played tons of old folks homes and churches- but the fire isn't there anymore and they're not hungry anymore. I'd so much rather play in front of kids. These days kids like anything and everything, and it's a great feeling turnin' them on to somethin' new, because it was just the opposite for me. Bein' a hillbilly and seein' a punk band for the first time just changed everything, so I'd like to bring that to them- just the opposite."

And so far, the kids have dug it. It never ceases to surprise Whitmore. "Opening up for hardcore bands, I always think that they're gonna throw rocks at me or my banjo, but everywhere I've been the punks have been warm and receptive."

And so far so have the critics, even on uber-hip Web sites like Pitchfork.com, where the writers don't really have a clue what he's doing but like him anyway. Pitchfork's scribe dwelt on how "authentic" Whitmore was in comparison to the (shudder) Miami-based folkies in Iron and Wine, and rated Whitmore's debut album, Hymns for the Hopeless, "very good" while completely mislabeling it as neo-blues that borrows heavily from "Delta" sources such as Leadbelly and Doc Watson. Well, Leadbelly was from the Texas-Louisiana border, played a 12-string guitar instead of a banjo, and had a voice that was clear instead of gravelly and was pitched about an octave higher than Whitmore's, but other than that I guess you could say they have a lot in common. Watson's a decent comparison, though he's from nowhere near a delta of any sort, and old-time mountain musicians like Ralph Stanley and the Louvin Brothers are much better sounds-likes anyway.

"I try to rip off Ralph Stanley wherever I can," Whitmore admits. "Oops, I mean 'pay homage to Ralph Stanley.' But really it's just rippin' off."

Several reviewers name-check Johnny Cash, and though neither Whitmore's Tom Waits-like voice nor his music sounds remotely like the Man in Black, there's a decent case to be made there. It's in the lyrics- Hymns doesn't sound like a Cash record, but you could imagine Cash recording or even writing some of the songs. Take these lines from Hymns, and see how easy it is to imagine them to a Cash boom-chicka-boom and delivered in his patented quavery bass; "Those daisies, they sure look pretty/ growing there near your stone/ They remind me that life continues/ and I'll never be alone." (Come to think of it, you could imagine those lines on a Greg Wood record, too.)

Like Cash, Whitmore is into elementals and has a firm grasp on a certain rural spirituality, if not traditional religion, and he also has a deft hand at painting pictures that are as dark as tar. Hymns, after all, is a concept record about the deaths of his parents.

"One of them died first and then the other died too, because that's just how it works. I lost them both at a young age, and so that's why the album's all about death and that's why the album is dedicated to people who will never hear it. It's for them and they'll never hear it. So it's about death- losin' your loved one and then decidin' that you better go too 'cause that's the only way you'll ever be with them again. And hopefully by the end of the record you get the sense that- and I'm not Christian or anything like that- but that maybe one day our paths will cross again in anotherÉrealm or something like that. Life goes on, we're still here, so let's just do what we can, you know."

Also like Cash, Whitmore is a farm boy from the banks of the Mississippi. Growing up in the country under a big sky can get you thinking about all kinds of primordial philosophy. First questions and all that. Hymns is a typical first album in that it attempts to explain everything. Whitmore has it boiled down to a few pithy words now. "Shit dies, shit grows, and everything just goes in a big circle. People, too."

The Mississippi has given us Mark Twain and Johnny Cash, and boatloads of blues, jazz and rock and roll. And maybe one day people will be lumping Whitmore in there among the best of them. On coming of age near the Father of Waters, Whitmore waxes Asiatic. "It goes back to the ancient Chinese art of being in harmony with your surroundings- the feng shui and running water and all that."

A 25-year-old neo-bluegrass banjo picker from Iowa talking about feng shui? And pronouncing it correctly? Who plays on the hardcore punk circuit? Like I said, the surprises never stop with this guy. And chances are that if you catch him at this underground gig, you'll have a story to surprise your grandkids with. They'll be shocked to know how cool you were once, a long time ago.

Pitchfork

October 16, 2003 | by Amanda Petrusich

When Iron & Wine's Sam Beam was inadvertently outed as an affable film professor from a Miami University, quizzical glances began whizzing across record store floors almost immediately, as packs of perplexed fans attempted to reconcile Beam's gritty, unpretentious four-track folk to his thong-friendly neon pink surroundings. Luckily, neo-blues banjo crooner William Elliot Whitmore's hometown address checks out alright: Whitmore was raised in a small Iowa local dug deep into the banks of the mighty, cred-bestowing Mississippi, thereby making it safe to presume his banjo theatrics and whiskey-drenched mumble have been, um, authentically rendered. Breathe easy.

"Hymns for the Hopeless" is Whitmore's proper debut, but his relaxed, porch-singer poses suggest he'd been playing the bedroom-poet game long before these compositions were officially documented: "Hymns" pairs Whitmore's deep, throaty vocals with scratchy banjo and skittering harmonica and the subsequent songs seem both intensely indebted (see Leadbelly, Doc Watson, and the grisly, murder-and-redemption narratives of Johnny Cash) and oddly anachronistic -- an artful, evocative fusion of bellowed country, sheepish folk and filthy blues, as unexpected as familiar.

Percussion (usually delivered via handclap and provided by Lucas Tweedy or the fantastically named Michael Cornelius Lust) occasionally breaks in, as does organ, bass and some acoustic and brass finger guitar, but for the most part, "Hymns" is a one-man show -- and Whitmore's thick, easier-than-Waits growl is, fortunately, dynamic enough to carry nearly all of that burden. The record opens with an a capella lament to lifeless hearts ("Cold and Dead") that might fare better had it been buried a little deeper in; Whitmore's concentrated voice takes time to acclimate to, and "Cold and Dead," with a little over three minutes of pure, uninterrupted warble, can be a sort of overwhelming introduction.

"Sometimes Our Dreams Float Like Anchors" is a lifting, bang-and-whimper parable (check Whitmore's prophesizing: "I'll be free when I'm dead") told by way of slinging hammers and completed by feisty drum rolls, well-timed bings and Whitmore's persuasively sweet strumming. "From the Cell Door to the Gallows" is Whitmore at his best: spare banjo plucks and a meandering vocal melody showcase his soulful, honest intentions and proclivity for wearied sighs.

Authenticity, regardless of its relative worth, is bound to be a big issue for Whitmore, mostly because "Hymns" borrows so heavily from its Delta predecessors, and does so in a way that's not particularly apologetic. He tackles the proper poetic terrain -- slow, sad songs about drinking, loving, losing, devils and shotguns -- letting his voice quiver, bend and purr just like his backyard river, rushing in all the right spots. So even if "Hymns" occasionally seems like paint-by-numbers blues, it's also an astoundingly well-rendered likeness, teeming with unmistakably genuine hollers and cries.

The Onion

October 9, 2003 | by Josh Modell

The ripple effect from the wild success of the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack has apparently reached the world of indie rock: Southern Records, home to bands like 90 Day Men and Ui, just released Will Whitmore's debut of mountainous Americana, "Hymns for the Hopeless." It'd be convenient to compare the startling record to work by Will Oldham, but those comparisons will only come up because Whitmore is young and plays with independent rock bands - a generation of older, and he'd be wowing Ôem at Old Town School. (That's a compliment.) As it stands, he surely wends his way through the bars and into the hearts of bluegrass and Americana fans.

southern records