Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 26, 1994 TAG: 9408170038
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Only his gig is more than gimmick, bluesman Bill Wharton explains. "There's a lot of community in the show. It's like the parties you have where everybody ends up in the kitchen," he has said. "That's the atmosphere we're striving for."
Literally. The gimmick is: Wharton cooks up a fat pot of gumbo on stage whenever he performs. He will play The Coffee Pot in Roanoke with his band The Ingredients on Wednesday.
Then he serves it up to the audience.
The gumbo is something Wharton, 47, began a few years back, first as a joke, but then as a more serious statement to the power of music and food on the soul - and the senses. Wharton treats the ears and nose and taste buds equally.
He tempers the spicy mixture with a straightforward dose of blues, although some of his songs - "Red Beans Cooking," "Let The Big Dog Eat," "Stir Your Pot" and "Great Big Fanny" - do tie into the food theme.
They call him the Sauce Boss, or the Gumbo Preacher, a cross between Colonel Sanders, Julia Child and B.B. King. His contract includes "a gumbo rider," which require the nightclubs to have most of his ingredients waiting for him, although he has been known to dash out to the store between sets to buy rice.
He only brings along his own sauce and a few spices.
The sauce is his own product, "Liquid Summer Datil Pepper Hot Sauce," which he also peddles by the bottle at each show and by mail order.
He used to grow the peppers for the sauce himself on his farm near Tallahassee, Fla. But his music career has since picked up - he has a new album out, "South of the Blues," on King Snake Records - and so now he buys his peppers.
Still, the recipe is the same. He uses habanero peppers that originated in the Caribbean. He describes them as "serious." Then he blends them with vegetable fiber, vinegar, garlic, sugar, onions, olive oil, tomatoes and spices. "No preservatives, no stabilizers, no artificial nothing," he says. "Just put it on the shelf and it will settle out."
On the final gumbo, Wharton is not so strict. "Gumbo is whatever's in the fridge - sausages, chicken, vegetables, little creatures. You steam it until it becomes the primordial ooze, stuff that squooshes up between the toes of your taste buds," he has called it.
And it always gets eaten.
"We've played gigs with only 40 people in the house and a huge pot and it always all goes. And then sometimes there are beaucoup people and, although maybe I've trimmed the portions a bit and added some water, if you were willing to get up out of your seat and stand in line in Uncle Bill's Soup Kitchen, you'd get some gumbo. There's always been enough."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***