Vance Gilbert

“I’m black, I sing, I play an acoustic guitar, and I don’t play the blues,” Gilbert explains. That may be a broad statement, but it rings with truth. Over the course of a prolific career that extends back to the early ’90s, Vance Gilbert has recorded with his good friend Ellis Paul and shared stages worldwide with Aretha Franklin, Shawn Colvin, Arlo Guthrie, the Milk Carton Kids, George Carlin, Anita Baker, the Subdudes, Paul Reiser and many others. “If Joni Mitchell and Richie Havens had a love child, with Rodney Dangerfield as the midwife, the results might have been something close to the great Vance Gilbert,” Richmond magazine humorously observes. But playfulness and comicality are central to Gilbert’s stage show and persona. His remarkable rapport with audiences and his free spirited performances inspired one critic to hail him as “a folkie trapped in a vaudevillian body,” with “a voice that could have been on the opera stage, a wit that could have been on a comedy stage and a songwriting talent that’s thrust him on the folk stage for decades.”

Ultimately, it’s the impact that he has on his audiences that matters to him the most. “People take away from these songs what they decide they’re going to take away,” he reflects. “I would hope they walk away thinking. If that’s the case, then I’ve done my job successfully.”

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