William Elliott Whitmore, Field Songs
Reviewed by: Jean-Philip Guy
Iowa-native William Elliott Whitmore’s Field Songs delivers honest and down-to-earth country blues. Minimalist by choice, often accompanied only by his banjo or acoustic guitar, Whitmore’s gravelly voice nostalgically leads us towards memories of simpler country times.
Field Songs, his seventh release, his second on ANTI-, is a bluegrass hymn to the way things were. Of course, there is nothing “new” here, except the stories told. The notes go pretty much the way you expect. No ground is broken. Whitmore’s style is a tribute to a nearly forgotten time of bluegrass heroes, not a foray into the unknown. It does manage to create exactly that mood you’d expect it to create: one of quiet reserve, waiting for the song to finish before you can speak again. His voice and music lead to daydreams, and drive you inside yourself time and time again.
Lyrically, Whitmore hovers between resilient sadness and careful optimism. Never for these folk the great highs and lows, because anyway, there’ll be fieldwork to do soon enough. An ode to resilience, many of Field Songs’ tracks are about moving on despite all the roadblocks, despite all the heartaches; always “Bury Your Burdens in the Ground”, never keep them on your back. “Remember when we had nothing and made it work”, “we’ll be the freest of the free” he sings in “Let’s Do Something Impossible.” Yes I’m old enough or sick enough, he writes, for a walking cane. But yet, he “Don’t Need It:” Give me a hammer, I’ll build myself a home, a feeling also present in “Field Song.” In these songs, Whitmore efficiently channels this primal promethean desire we have to make something of ourselves, to craft and mould what is around us to fit our desires, this precious and terrifying feeling we sometimes lose in our comfortable, civilized lives. In “We’ll Carry On,” a family loses its paternal figure, its protector, but through song, they’ll carry on, just like that old tree they planted, or that old story that still echoes. Sometimes, even getting work is hard and one needs to climb fences, and outrun dogs, to “Get There From Here”, and maybe send something back for these mouths left back South. And all that would be for nothing, since “Everything Gets Gone” right? Well, no, as this isn’t a nihilist statement, but merely a factual one: everything does “get gone” at some point or another. But, like we said, there’ll be fieldwork to do soon enough, so why worry about it?
Whitmore thus locks us up in life’s loop, where the everyday problems of Man are inevitably ignored by Nature’s rhythms: This too shall pass, remember? He does all that in 8 tracks lasting all of thirty-four minutes, on banjo and guitar. On two tracks only does he add a further level of “sophistication:” First, he puts a repetitive thrumming bass drum in the one blues track of the album, “Don’t Need It”, and second, he repeats that bass drum track, but adds tambourine on the album’s final song “Not Feeling Any Pain.” To butter us up some more, the album starts with the sounds of dawn on the farmstead, and closes with, you guessed it, sounds of dusk. Yes, it is a bit much, but it fits.
Listening to Field Songs feels like sitting next to a campfire while that uncle (you know, the one that almost made it) picks up that guitar on a chilly summer night. You look up and stare at the cloudless sky and feel it swallow you up, flying by voice and guitar. Has your uncle sung that song before? You bet, and so have a thousand fireside minstrels at a thousand different campfires. But does that matter in the slightest? Heck no: you’re still flying.