Blues guitarist Bill ‘Sauce Boss’ Wharton brings the heat

A potent sense of humor infiltrates everything Bill Wharton does. Here’s a white blues guitarist, comfortably past middle age, who titled his autobiography The Life and Times of Blind Boy Billy: Y’all Don’t Know the Half of It.

The Tallahassee tunesmith, who returns to the Palladium Theater Side Door Cabaret Wednesday, May 20, is known around the world for his unique stage show: Stinging slide guitar and an incendiary vocal growl … and gumbo. Real, hot, simmering gumbo, right there in the room.

Indeed, he is the Sauce Boss, and has been for well over 30 years. An aficionado and careful cultivator of hot datil and habanero peppers, Wharton prepares the culinary delight, with chicken, crawfish tails and smoked pork sausage from Bradley’s, a 100-year old country store just outside of Tallahassee. During his show.

When he’s done playing, everybody gets a bowl.

In his performance contract, Wharton has a specific request. “Instead of taking all the brown ones out, if you know what I’m saying, it’s like ‘I need some okra, and some zucchini and some onions and some other stuff’ … I bring the roux and the hot sauce and the venue generally provides everything else.”

The hot sauce, Liquid Summer, is his own creation.

In a 2023 Catalyst interview, Blind Boy Billy explained how he went from being just another really good blues player to the one, the only, Sauce Boss. Liquid Summer was his gateway sauce.

“After a while, I started taking it around to the gigs with me,” he said. “I thought if people were going to come over to my house and eat up all my hot sauce, I’ll put a label on it and sell it to them. I would make a couple of gallons and it’d be gone in a couple of weeks.”

At his shows, Wharton recalled, “I was putting it on chips or something like that, just to show everybody how good it was. And I was looking for a way to really showcase it. Because the sauce is a different animal; it’s got this creeper burn. The datil pepper has this little thing where it kind of creeps up on you.”

After well over 200,000 bowls of gumbo and millions of road miles, the music remains the main ingredient. Wharton’s just-released latest album, With Extra Sauce, is a full-tilt blues band set.

“I’m not motivated by the bling, if you know what I’m saying,” he explained. “I want to have a good quality of life.” As his gumbo-crafting became legendary, “it sort of evolved into this tent revival of rock ‘n’ roll brotherhood and sharing and all that kind of thing.”

The idea of music and food, together, is “really health-ful in terms of your psyche,” he offered.

His show is unique, which is what he likes about it. “It’s afforded me really a different life,” Wharton said. “Because I’m not just a musician regurgitating stuff – no pun intended – playing the music I rehearsed. There’s a lot of improvisation in what I do, musically, but also, every show it’s different.

“It’s a gift, to me as a performer. Because I relax into it, everybody relaxes into it – come on, stir the gumbo, and everything’s OK. For a couple of hours, we’re all OK. Which is pretty amazing in this day and age.”

The Wednesday, May 20 show begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are at this link.