Sauce Boss

The Cave presents

The Sauce Boss

Wednesday, July 13, 2022 7pm $20

In addition to his gutsy solo one-man band tracks, the Sauce Boss has taken his one-man band and added violin, sousaphone, snare drum and backing singers to tell the ragtime story of an irascible traveling fiddler, in his January 2019 release Blind Boy Billy.

The album is a companion to the book, "The Life and Times of Blind Blind Boy Billy", a memoir with a songbook and a cookbook. Wharton filets the story of his life, smokes it, and sandwiches it between tunes and recipes. It's the backstory of a life of sharing food and music.  The tunes and the recipes follow the story, with the Sauce Boss mixing media like it was cornbread. 

Bill Wharton is the Sauce Boss, a slide guitarist and singer known for his gastronomic boogie-woogie, and his Liquid Summer Hot Sauce. He cooks up a pot of gumbo at his concerts and serves it free to his audience. More than a musical performance, the media is "mixed" into a community of sharing. Jimmy Buffett sings about the Sauce Boss in his tune "I Will Play For Gumbo." Jonathan Demme used Wharton’s slide guitar anthem “Let the Big Dog Eat” in his movie, “Something Wild”. For nearly 30 years The Sauce Boss has combined his music, his hot sauce, his gumbo, and his Southern hospitality all over the US, and into Canada, Europe, and Asia. Thousands of gigs. Over 1,000,000 miles on the highway. Countless flights. Tons of hot sauce. Way over 200,000 people served, and he’s never charged a penny for the gumbo.