WILLIAM ELLIOTT WHITMORE
Hymns for
the hopeless
LP/CD, Southern
“The sun will never shine / on this cold dead heart of mine”. William
Elliott Whitmore makes it clear from the beginning that his world is one of
pain and woe, of dim lights and the closing of night, the loss of live and
love and utter hopelessness. There is not one single word or line that comes
close to something distantly related to luck or good fortune. From the
accapella opening song “cold and dead” – the sounds of cold nightwinds
blowing in the back cannot be regarded as music in this setting, though it
fits perfectly and gives away a little of the mystery of the artist – to
the closing percussion-based gospel of “our paths will cross again” this
bastard record presents a world that not even William Faulkner could think
of. In half of the songs the person addressed is already dead (e.g. “does
me no good” or “pine box”) or about to die (e.g. “from the cell door
to the gallows” or “burn my body”). The rest is about the pain and
hurt that is heaped upon anyone with a living heart until its candle blows
out and is gone.
Whitmore presents his depressing and frustrating world in one of the most
basic, earthbound and almost primordial of all musical genres: bluegrass,
with a heavy dose of blues. Accompanied by a sparse collection of
steelkit-drums and slide-guitar, but mainly mandolins and banjos and a
lonely acoustic guitar, he wails like a rusty saw over three-chord-melodies,
that sound as if they have been sung a million times already. But he infuses
them with so much energy and life, that the listener can’t help but draw
it’s attention to them. The simple melodies and no less simple structures
strike a string in every listener, and very much like the field-songs of the
decades around 1900, which were all about the hard life of those living and
the promise of a better world after death (maybe), and thereby helped to
lighten the burden of earthly life at least during the song, the “hymns
for the hopeless” have much of the same effect. A cathartic wallowing in
the evils of our existence, that we get out of cleansed and magically
refilled with will to live. The lonely organ that starts with the second
verse in “burn my body” is as uplifting as the organ in a funeral can
be, but no funeral is complete without a good requiem. No matter how much
“whiskey that’s done been spilled” (from: “Lord only knows”) or
“that no good thing will last” (from: “pine box”), live goes on and
since we really have no choice to live on in our “personal hell” (also
from: “pine box”) we can chose between living on or drinking ourselves
blind, or something in between. Who directs our fate? Is there a god and a
devil? Whitmore displays some religiousness, but only that of the human
being beaten so much by fate that he has no other way to go anymore than to
look for some unknown, outer force to blame and to pray for help to.
It is clear, that these are not age-old recordings of some clandestine
field-worker of the 1930’s but new and modern recordings and songs. The
true magic of this record is the dynamic between its timelessness and its
modernity. There is no real hint to the time of creation in the songs
themselves, but we have to thank “William Elliott Whitmore for reviving
the genre of bluegrass and blues to our times once more. No, this is not a
Frankenstein-clone, but the revival of a musical tradition that lies deeply
buried in all our modern music – from jazz to hiphop – and has been
forgotten for way too long. Various bands have tried themselves at differing
visions of the most primary form of modern music – the twelve-bar,
three-chord blues / bluegrass – and some of them will always be close to
my heart. I’d recommend the following to anybody interested: P.W.Long, Black Heart
Procession, Laughing Hyenas or the Scud Mountain Boys. But none
of those has ever managed to strip this kind of music down to its bare bones
as much as William Elliott Whitmore.
Various rumours go around as to who this person really is. Apparently he
is no eighty-year old survivor of the earliest rock’n’roll-eras, even
though his voice sounds like a century of Lucky Strikes (no pun intended)
and Kentucky Bourbon. Maybe Whitmore is a lonesome thirty-something with a
punkrock / hardcore-background, who has finally found that bluegrass / blues
contain more wisdom and experience of life than punkrock ever will be able
to. I haven’t yet found the will to do more research on the guy or the
creation of “hymns for the hopeless”, because I really don’t want to.
I feel that a little mystery and enigma does me no bad in these times of
information-overflow. Some decades ago, a record was just a record, maybe
even without a printed sleeve. All that was important was there in the
music. And with these songs, I guess, it should be the same way again.
At the end of the record, Whitmore promises more song in a little spoken
advertisement for the next record. Maybe that’s a hint at the radio-shows
of the Thirties and Forties, the only way to get known back then for any
musician in the US? But Whitmore might only know them from re-releases of
original Hank Williams recordings or some such. (But strangely enough, the
same thing current hiphoppers do, when they count of the names of all
participants, the title of the record and the record company in the
beginning and the end of their songs.) Let’s hope or pray to good –
everyone to his one inclination – that he keeps his promise. And delivers.
