The punk-inspired singer-songwriter stops in Chattanooga this week
William Elliott Whitmore is a singer-songwriter, banjoist, and guitarist from Lee County, Iowa, who still lives on the farm where he grew up. Over nearly two decades and across eleven albums, he’s fused country, blues, folk, and punk into a kind of minimalist Southern Gothic sound.
It’s hard to describe the sound of a farm-raised Iowan who counts The Jesus Lizard, Bad Brains, and Minutemen as just as important as Ray Charles, Bill Monroe, and Doc Watson, but somehow, it all makes sense when he starts to play.
In 2011, NPR’s World Cafe host David Dye called Whitmore’s album Field Songs one of the year’s most underrated albums…