William Elliott Whitmore
William Elliott Whitmore sings like he feels that kinship in his bones. The Iowa songwriter seems constantly aware of mortality–sometimes he’s droll about it, sometimes he accepts it, and sometimes he’s fearful, enraged, or sorrowful, but he’s never far from the final bottom line. When he plunks his banjo, strums his guitar, and stomps his foot, he’s marking out time like a heart that’s counting down the number of beats left in it. He’s defiant, though, not resigned: that stomp’s a protest, like he’s banging on a ceiling instead of a floor–a very low ceiling, with six feet of dirt on top.
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That simplicity sometimes seems like a trap–like anybody working with the blues and traditional Americana, Whitmore writes plenty of songs that sound a lot like one of his other songs. But the small variations between them draw more attention than dramatic differences would; it’s like in spoken word, where you can get people to listen harder to a whisper than to a shout. His set was draining and seemed brief, though I realized afterward that he’d played for a full hour. The emotional centerpiece of the show was “Porchlight,” the last track on Ashes to Dust and the final song of the set proper. It’s from the point of view of a farmer forced to face the reality of dying in a hospital instead of at home, where he used to work the fields till long after nightfall and his wife would leave the porch light on to help him find his way back in the darkness. A slow, aching mountain ballad, it drags us through most of the stages of his reconciliation with death, and by the closing lines–“Even though just a memory is all that I’ll be / Would you leave the porch light on for me?”–I was empathizing so closely with him that I felt just about ready to die myself. What could Whitmore do after that, except give us a minute to breathe before cranking up his encore?
