WET WILLIE: SLICKS FROM DIXIE
Rock ’n’ roll—especially the kind of wild demonic rhythms that have been hurtling out of the South since the time Elvis first mounted a flat bed truck and Jerry Lee Lewis got expelled from the Southwestern Bible Institute—has always been a music of the church.
WET WILLIE: SLICKS FROM DIXIE
by
Patrick Goldstein
Rock ’n’ roll—especially the kind of wild demonic rhythms that have been hurtling out of the South since the time Elvis first mounted a flat bed truck and Jerry Lee Lewis got expelled from the Southwestern Bible Institute—has always been a music of the church. It was sacred music that celebrated sex and sin while preaching against temptation. It was music that didn’t merely praise the Lord but picked a fight with him, like two drunken soldiers arguing over a broken-down blonde.
This unabashed affection for the South’s rich heritage of black spirituals and soul music, the kind of music only heard in Sunday sermons south of the Mason-Dixon line, has always set Wet Willie apart from the rest of their Dixie rock peers. They’ve been the black sheeps of the Southern rock clan. While the Allman Brothers plunged into the motorpsycho nightmare of urban blues and the Marshall Tucker/Charlie Daniels Band contingent proudly donned cowboy hats, borrowing liberally from traditional country weepers and fiddle battles, Wet Willie steeped themselves in the passion and Pentecostal fervor of black church music. They were proud graduates of the Stax/Volt college of musical knowledge.