Poor Mojo's Newswire

William Elliott Whitmore doesn't believe in a heaven or a hell. He believes in his home state of Iowa, a place kind of halfway between both. He sings ebulliently about cold, black Iowa dirt being tossed onto his coffin lid after he's been levered down into his grave and how it runs through his veins, getting muddy when the skies open up to drop off some precipitation (Whitmore might call it a puker depending on the strength and duration), usually the prayed for kind. He wants to roll around in it and rub it into his teeth. He loves when it's under his feet. During the summer months, he orders his booking agent to keep his schedule light, allowing him the opportunity to savor as many of the summertime days working on his farmer's tan, going fishing barefooted and casting a line into a limpid family pond for whatever might nibble, tug and put up a fight. The great Mark Twain - born in Hannibal, Mo., only a few hours paddle down the Mississippi River from Whitmore's home in aloof little Montrose, Iowa - chronicler of all-American boyhood, could have used him as a character study, then blushed a little as Will grew unpredictably into the tattooed man he is today.

Twain would have proudly worked it into his humble prose as Whitmore would never have let him down. He doesn't let anyone who's followed him through his career down, feverishly picking his banjo - a junky, rusty thing that remarkably sounds sweeter than molasses - stamping his dress-shoed foot for instant heartbeat drums and writing words that make the malaise and the profundity of living all these consecutive days sound like they're not to be feared, but to be seen as the reasons why goodness exists. It doesn't just happen. Whitmore assures us that there's no take without the give. If a loved one is lost, a flower blooms beside a headstone in Whitmore's songs. Deaths, while unfortunate and sad, are grains of salt in the songs on his three Southern Records releases. They exist to steel you, to make room for perspective - to add that meaning to life. Oh, that's nothing new to suggest - that death staggers you and reinforces the need to make everything count - but Whitmore's way of making his point, with a voice as heavy as an anchor and enriched with the husky rawhide of a man four times his age, resounds like a brick dropped down a wishing well. It's darkly lit and it gives his songs, all of which have an unmistakable amble, a timelessness that carries the authority of ghosts. . . .