Webb Wilder

Ages before Big and Rich started yukking it up, Webb Wilder was taking country-music themes on a comic detour through vigorous vintage-flying-saucers rock & roll, B-movie parodies and outsize stage personae. Like such diverse characters as Unknown Hinson and BR-549, he’s combined an unreconstructed love for Southern-roots music—rockabilly, gospel, blues—with imaginatively novel, original material. It’s stuff that plays sympathetically on tradition while somehow standing outside the pedestrian norm of contemporary-country fare.

The Hattiesburg, Mississippi, native has been kicking around the club circuit since the 1980s, animating his propulsive, guitar-and-backbeat–driven sound with tall tales and urban legends. He was a cable cult hero on the old USA Network, which ran his 1984 short film “Webb Wilder, Private Eye in ‘The Saucer’s Reign,’_” a spoof on alien abductions and “volumptuous” Dixie chicks, as a frequent late-night feature. (Along with subsequent comedies, the piece is collected in the video comp Corn Flicks). Likewise, the best of Wilder’s oeuvre is sampled on the aptly titled Scattered, Smothered and Covered (Varèse Sarabande), which includes such concert staples as “Horror Hayride,” “One Taste of the Bait” and “Loud Music.” As always, expect the singer to dispense his own personal tao to go with his psychotronic hillbilly vamps live: “Work hard, rock hard, eat hard, sleep hard, grow big, wear glasses if you need ’em.”