Independent Arts News Reporting 
Folk Singer Vance Gilbert will be performing at the Princeton Folk Music Society & World Cafe Live in Philadelphia this December. Photo Credit: Contributed.
An Interview with A Good, Good Man, Folk Singer Vance Gilbert
By Lori Goldstein
Arts News Now writer Lori Goldstein talks with Folk Singer Vance Gilbert about his current cross-country solo tour for his latest album—A Good, Good Man. Vance Gilbert will be at the Princeton Folk Music Society on December 9, and World Café Live in Philadelphia on December 10.
The first time I heard Vance Gilbert sing was Halloween night, when he wore a blonde curly wig and oversized glasses. I was late to the party, Vance Gilbert’s MondayAcousticPajamaParty, that is. He’d begun his 7:30 PM Monday livestreams a week after Covid came to town. For every broadcast, he’s donated 10 to 15 percent of viewers’ contributions to local non-profit organizations in the Boston area.
It was especially fun to hear Vance recite his timely rap, “The Day Before November,” with its multicultural refrain: “We were brown and tall Jew and small/Freckled fat bucktooth flat/Black and broken short and Christian/With teeth and hair in every direction/We were 20 views on just which super hero had it all/But the day before November was the best day of the fall.” The rap’s central story, about a battered boy named Mikey, is just one of the myriad of tales Vance has woven during his 40-plus years as a folksinger/songwriter.
It turns out Vance and I have more in common than just our age. We both spent our elementary school years in Philadelphia, then our families migrated in ’68,’69–Vance’s to Willingboro, NJ; mine, to a northeast suburb of the city. Willingboro is noteworthy for the 1960 NJ State Supreme Court ruling that ordered builder William Levitt to sell his affordable homes to Blacks, thereby ending exclusionary housing practices.
“Willingboro was really a mixed bag of people,” recalls Vance. “Every house was the same: ranch, colonial, Cape Cod. Every house had somebody different in it: Black, white, Puerto Rican; Black, white, Jewish. It was quite diverse.”
Even though he is Black, as a teenager Vance found himself hanging out with white kids because most of the things he did, such as building model airplanes and playing tennis, involved them. “Riding around with my high school buddies, we split the difference. They wanted to listen to the Beach Boys in the car, and I wanted to listen to Earth, Wind, and Fire. They knew that EWF was better to dance to.”
Folk Singer, Vance Gilbert is on Tour for his latest album release, “A Good, Good Man”. Photo Credit: Contributed.
Like most college students, Vance was figuring out what color his rainbow would be. With thoughts of becoming a tennis teaching professional, Vance had only Arthur Ashe to look toward as a role model. At Connecticut College, where just five percent of the student population was Black, he completed a degree in biology with the idea of teaching it. Yet during his sophomore year, Vance began teaching himself beyond the realm of science: he took a few lessons on acoustic guitar, learned how to play the electric bass, plus the double bass on an instrument the college had lent him. “I was out of tune a lot, but I could ‘walk’ and play the blues, get around enough just to say that somebody had a bass player.”
“As I started playing bass, I guess I really wanted to be, oh magic me, Mr. Gregarious. I wanted to be more central to the music, I wanted to write my own songs and I wanted to sing. So I started listening to both of the Taylors, Kenny Rankin, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Joni Mitchell—everybody that played the guitar that sounded at least kind of jazzy, soulful…I really wanted to do it with the acoustic guitar. I think it was Kenny Rankin and James Taylor that made me think I didn’t want to try to be an electric jazz guitar vocalist like George Benson, but I wanted to be acoustic at it.”
“The acoustic guitar thing…nobody [Black] was doing that. And when I say nobody, I’m not talking about Taj Majal or Bill Withers—everybody was comparing me to Bill Withers, but in a lot of ways I’m nothing like Bill Withers. There’s a similarity, other than the fact that we both play the acoustic guitar and we’re Black. I’ve always forged my own way, and I’ve been more than once the Black guy doing whatever that thing was, and that’s how it’s kind of been. So was I lonely? No. But I also didn’t have a lot of Black people doing what I was doing in my day-to-day.”
When he moved to Boston out of college, Vance’s day-to-day consisted of teaching multicultural arts to kids in public schools and performing cocktail music in clubs at night. “I sang in places that would tolerate me, murdering the great American songbook. I was doing everything from Sondheim to Stevie Wonder.”
In the early ‘90s, Vance started playing at Club Passim—”the longest open historically, continually-running coffeehouse in the country.” It was operated by Bob and Rae Ann Donilon, who had reconfigured it as a nonprofit entity, its predecessor being Club 47 in the ‘60s. Back then folksingers like Joan Baez, Tom Rush, and Bob Dylan played there. Now that Vance lives 4.6 miles from Club Passim in Cambridge, it’s his “home club,” where he performs once a year. “You’re never king in your own backyard,” Vance wisely points out.
In 1992 Shawn Colvin asked Vance to open her Fat City tour. “I don’t think I was an eighth of a writer that I am now, so it always kind of breaks my heart that [I was] given the opportunity to do something [for which I] didn’t quite have all the tools.” Opening for Shawn was the catalyst for Vance’s career, launched with the 1994 album, Edgewise.
Vance fondly recalls the 150 days he toured with George Carlin over the course of two-and-a-half years. “It was a blast, talk about a genius.” And now, in addition to his own solo tour, Vance has been opening for comedian Paul Reiser. “Right now I have the hottest 20 minutes of folk music, ‘cause that’s what he wants in front of him, 20 minutes of somebody up-tempo and entertaining, funny with good songs and a good voice. He trusts me and that’s how I roll with him. I’m really lucky.”
You get a slice of Vance’s wit in a song like “Out the Way We Came In,” which tells the story of a couple ending their 26-year marriage in the same courthouse where it began. They celebrate their amicable divorce with “champagne and sandwiches/That we snuck in the back…And we talked the court officer into throwing back the bouquet/There was poundcake and sherbet/Then we went on our way/I caught the judge grinnin’/He was looking at you.”
“You know what?” Vance says. “A great story doesn’t necessarily have to be true, but when it’s based on a certain amount of truth, it’s a lot of fun.” He explains that when his own partner got divorced from her first husband, she gave him a ride to the courthouse. After they spoke to the judge and got divorced, they got something to eat, then went for a walk and had a great day. “But they were done. They were done being a couple.”
It’s no surprise that this masterful storyteller writes the lyrics for a song first. “My reason for that is I feel that I want to make a point of being an African-American songwriter that isn’t just groovy with a great voice. I want to have a story to tell with the king’s English in such a way that it is as undeniable a story as it might be coming from Rodgers and Hart, Tom Waits, or Joni Mitchell.” While Vance concedes that others may be better melody-writers than him, he believes he is “hands-down, first and foremost, a dulcet storyteller. That’s how I shake the apples from that tree.”
During his Halloween livestream, Vance sadly announced the passing of two old friends, Don Srull and Dan Driscoll. Then he cited the African proverb, “When an old man dies, a library burns.” Vance befriended both of these men in his late twenties, when he joined the Flying Aces Club, a worldwide network of hobbyists dedicated to the discipline of building rubber-band-powered, tissue-covered, free-flying model aircraft. Vance describes it as a low-tech hobby that survives despite our high-tech world.
“Particularly Don gave me the opportunity to, in a lot of ways, believe in myself when it came to the science of the hobby in which I indulge… he’s been at the forefront of this discipline for many years.” Since Vance didn’t have much of a music career then, he had time to explore the history and imitate the planes of the past with his models.
“Getting them to fly without any radios is quite a to-do, quite a bit of work. Doing that with him [Don], and there were many other old, white men that took me under their wing, pun fully intended, to do this hobby, and there’s nothing like it. This hobby is a perfect cross between art, science and sport, because we do fly, I guess you could say, against each other to see who can stay up the longest.”
Vance’s poignant song, “Old White Men,” memorializes his hobbyist heroes. Naturally it’s one that he enjoys performing time and time again, interpreting it differently each time he sings it. He confesses his three other favorites: “Unfamiliar Moon,” “Pie and Whiskey,” and “Goodbye Pluto.”
“Those four are pretty core for me…I don’t think I’ve ever played any of these songs absolutely the same any two times in a row. I’m able to breathe some life into what I’m doing enough that I’m pleased with the fact that the songs are good enough to repeat.”
Over the course of his career, Vance has a discography of 13 albums. He’s currently in the mixing process of his next album—The Mother of Trouble—due out in March 2023. He works with a recording engineer at Riverview Sound, run by Sam Margolis, in Waltham, MA. “I don’t really have a label, I record under Vance Gilbert. There’s no label here except my basement. I was on Rounder Records for a few years, then I went out on my own by ‘98.”
Vance’s current cross-country solo tour for his latest album—A Good, Good Man— takes him to the Princeton Folk Music Society on December 9, and then to World Café Live in Philadelphia on December 10. He opened for Paul Reiser at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, PA, on November 11.
Wherever his tours take him, Vance can’t help but view the world in terms of his racial identity. “I see myself as a Black man in this country. People with a more conservative point or a middling point might say, don’t you see yourself as American? Yeah, but I see myself as a Black man. That’s not first, or second, or third. It’s just omnipresent because I own a mirror…I certainly know what it means to be a Black man in America. And it’s a different experience. Let’s put it this way, it’s one that I can discuss, but I can’t explain.”
An adage that Vance tries to live by comes from Miles Davis: “Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime to sound like yourself.”
“I love that one because here I am, it’s no secret, I’m 64 years old, but I just feel like this is the best I’ve written, sung and played right now. This is a Renaissance-y kind of time…I just feel like there’s more music in me. I’m just now starting to get to the point where I can solidly say, yeah, that’s a good song, I can write good songs now.”
I ask Vance, “Don’t you think that with maturity, artists can go way past what they might have done when they were younger?” He responds, “I think so, I hope so. At that point you also learn what you can and cannot do, and hopefully to your benefit…I’m elated that I can have this capability now. There’s a lot of people that don’t grow. I have the gift of being able to grow.”
Tickets available at: princetonfolk.org, worldcafelive.com
