Midwestern singer-songwriter William Elliott Whitmore's sophomore CD Ashes to Dust arrived back in the middle of August amid a pile of other stuff; I made a mental note to check it out because he was coming to town in early September with somebody or other. A week or so went by before I put the record on. When I did, however, I was immediately struck by the earthy, out-of-time earnestness of Whitmore's largely unadorned blend of American roots styles — particularly his voice, a gritty, mournful sound that seeps into the bones like wet winter chill.
I've gotta check out his set, I thought.
I dug up the press materials that came with the CD, to discover that Whitmore would be in town the following week. Wholly improbably, the acoustic solo performer would be plying his dustbowl dirges as the opening act for frenetic, kid-friendly Florida anarcho-punk cyclone Against Me!.
He's gonna get eaten alive, I thought.
I was wrong.
Sitting on a stool center stage at Ybor City's Masquerade, switching back and forth between guitar and banjo, the lanky, heavily tattooed Whitmore elicited a response that ranged from polite tolerance to outright thrall. Young fans entering the cavernous space lowered their usually raucous voices; the kids already positioned in front of the stage cheered and swayed; nobody loudly admonished that somebody "play some punk fuckin' rock!" between Whitmore's spare, soulful selections.
"Thanks a lot," said the singer-songwriter over the thunderous applause that followed his final song of the night, "and if you want to hear anymore, I'll be outside playin' in the street."
He didn't end up giving an al fresco encore performance that particular night, but it didn't keep the show, or the Southern jaunt in general, from being one of his favorites to date.
"That was one of the most fun tours I've ever done," says Whitmore during a phone interview nearly two months later. "I'd never played Florida before, and that was definitely the way to come, playing with Against Me! on their CD release tour. I was spoiled as hell. I felt like a king."
Some folks might find the idea of a solo Americana singer-songwriter touring with one of punk's most energetic outfits ill-advised at best, and doomed at worst. Whitmore doesn't. At least, he doesn't anymore. He's been getting in the van with underground all-ages acts for several years now, and most of the trepidation he initially felt about supporting louder and more brutal musicians has long since dissipated. For Whitmore, who spent most of his life on a farm in eastern Iowa, two hours from the nearest quasi-city, the discovery of punk's below-the-radar touring network was an epiphany — a way to get his music out that had nothing to do with an industry that was literally thousands of miles away.
"I didn't even know that it existed until I moved to Iowa City for a little while," he says. "I got introduced to this whole world of kids putting on shows. I thought you had to go through a booking agent, you had to be a big star.
"When I was first starting, I didn't know what [the punk fans] were gonna do, if they were gonna throw rocks at my banjo or what. It took me a while, but I wasn't afraid any more. I didn't have those apprehensions, wondering if they wanted to fight or yell rude shit at me. And that never really happened, everyone's been really kind. I feel fortunate to be able to bend people's ears, tell a story."
A discerning listen to Ashes to Dust (or his first album, Hymns for the Hopeless) provides ample explanation for the acceptance shown Whitmore by fans of more grating fare. His songs are raw, and personal, and profoundly emotional; the bottom line is, they're real, a fact anyone who finds solace in true punk's unvarnished worldview can respect. Whitmore began writing songs in his late teens in order to come to grips with the deaths of both his parents, and his material still evinces an uneasy intimacy with the inevitable nature of mortality. The songwriter played briefly in several garage bands as a youngster, and while he finally found an outlet in music much closer to the Appalachian and country-lament styles his family had listened to, the baldness and immediacy of punk's primal scream never left his aesthetic.
It was only after a few years of playing near his home to older, more traditional roots-music fans ("I'd played the watermelon festival, the corn-harvest festival") that Whitmore discovered the possibilities in the punk-suffused do-it-yourself touring scene. It must've seemed right up his alley.
"It's a cool juxtaposition," he allows. "It's nice to bring those worlds together. I want to let kids see rootsy things, the same way I got turned on to punk rock from the other end. Let them see a whole new world. I think they're interested in anything that isn't fake."
Whitmore has thus far avoided being associated with the hipper end of the alt-country spectrum that includes the likes of Iron & Wine and Lucero. As his profile rises, though, such associations are likely to occur. The concept giv es him pause; after all, his rural background certainly jibes more readily with the music he makes than those of songwriters merely dabbling in the roots/acoustic/Southern Gothic mystique. But he stops short of calling himself more authentic than the pack. "I don't know about that whole scene," he says. "It isn't a world I've been subjected to as much. I guess I would be glad to make any friends, anybody who makes music. I don't know who's a hipster, what's going on. I just try not to think about it."
Whitmore is starting to play to larger and more disparate audiences — his shows these days are often peopled with as many older alt-country fans as young punks. But for the time being, he's still game to tag along with any loud, good act that'll have him, and to try and show people it's the heart that matters more than the genre.
And if you like what you hear, chances are you'll still be able to get more of it out on the street after the show.
"Oh yeah — just for the hell of it," says Whitmore. "I don't do it to make any money, but just because I enjoy playing. That night [in Ybor City], I got sidetracked, maybe I just started drinking too much. But I do that as often as I can. I feel honored when kids want to hear more."
This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2005.