Featured Band Profiles

Bill Wharton, The Sauce Boss “Will Work For Gumbo” at The Green Parrot

 With an act that can be billed as “Justin Wilson meets Robert Johnson”, Bill Wharton, a.k.a The Sauce Boss, joined by local bluesman Bill Blue and Mick Kilgos,  will stir up the crowd as well as  the roux at The Green Parrot, beginning at 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday October 7th.

A Bill Wharton show is a soul-shouting picnic of rock & roll brotherhood. And at the end of the show, everyone eats. Wharton gives new meaning to “dinner and a show”, with a unique mix of his spicy slide guitar blues and his own hot sauce in New Orleans-style gumbo cooked onstage. When the gumbo is finally thick and dark as voodoo, Bill dishes out and the crowd takes it like communion.

The inventor of gastronomical boogie woogie, Wharton has taken his guitar, a pot and a burner onto stages at blues festivals and juke joints all over the world. Since 1990, The Sauce Boss has fed over 150,000 people, all for free, while playing his swampy Florida blues.

Here’s what the critics say:

“Wharton’s slide guitar is always innovative, and his high baritone matches the tunes perfectly… However, it could be the eatin’ side of things that will permanently hook you into the Sauce Boss’s universe.” – Blues Revue Magazine

“Talk about a hot show: Bill Wharton brings it-music and gumbo-to a boil and never lets ’em leave hungry… the poet laureate of sauce, the sauce boss himself, a gentleman by the name of Bill Wharton, a modern hero of the blues and a visionary… he’s a gumbo preacher with a slide guitar… He and his band don’t just perform the blues they cook them, literally…” – Bob Shacochis, Gentleman’s Quarterly

“Bill Wharton is an American original… not only a fine slide guitarist… but serious about the blues in an almost evangelical fashion. He respects its origins as a field hand’s survival kit, and looks to ease his audience’s tensions and relieve their emotional starvation with a communal meal. Music and food is an old elixir, a participatory, not a spectator event.” – The Washington Post

Don’t miss this American original this weekend at The Green Parrot.