Evabeat Medoly Sauce

The Sauce Boss took his one-man band to Nashville to make his latest recording. On the title cut he is joined by violin, sousaphone, snare drum, and backing singers to tell the story of Blind Boy Billy, an irascible traveling fiddle player. The ragtime tune careens off the road into a down home fiddle stomp and ends up playing the blues away. Bill Wharton, aka "The Sauce Boss," takes a novel approach to blues performing, combining his love of cooking with his passion for gutsy guitar playing and singing. Wharton, who cooks up gumbo while on stage, is no flash in the pan, nor is his live act meant as some kind of cheap gimmickry; he is simply combining two things he's always loved to do: play music and cook dinner.

Mixing old school blues and folk with new school hip-hop and funk, G. Love’s electrifying new album, Philadelphia Mississippi, brings together both sides of the genre-bending pioneer’s eclectic career in a wildly innovative and deeply reverent sonic pilgrimage to the heart of the South. Produced by North Mississippi All-Stars’ Luther Dickinson, the collection is loose and spontaneous, full of joyful, improvised performances and freewheeling collaborations with a slew of special guests including blues torchbearers like Alvin Youngblood Hart and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and rap icons like Schoolly D and Speech. It would have been easy for G. Love to play it safe coming off his GRAMMY-nominated 2020 release, The Juice, but Philadelphia Mississippi is perhaps his most adventurous collection to date, ditching all the rules as it experiments with form and function in an ecstatic celebration of music’s power to connect across genres and generations. Born Garrett Dutton in Philadelphia, PA, G. Love first broke out in the early ’90s with his band, Special Sauce, on their strength of their Gold-selling self-titled debut. Over the next three decades, he would go on to release seven more critically acclaimed albums with Special Sauce (plus five on his own), become a fixture on festival lineups from Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza, and collaborate on the road and in the studio with artists as diverse as Lucinda Williams, Dave Matthews, The Avett Brothers, Jack Johnson, Keb’ Mo’, and DJ Logic.