Hi VanceFans - I’m in Texas and Oklahoma this coming weekend, then I am in Shirley MA.

10/26 Dallas, TX www.unclecalvins.org
10/27 Oklahoma City, OK www.bluedoorokc.com
10/28 Tulsa, OK http://www.woodyguthriecenter.org
11/3 Shirley, MA https://tickets.bullrunrestaurant.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=190

MONDAY MORNING MUSINGS

I’m just back from the Carolinas.

~ I just sent a scratch version of Another Good Day Above Ground for Chris Smither to learn. He’ll be on my new album...

~ Greenville was a gift. See, not but 16 hours before I arrived there I’d written a letter to a concert promoter that historically dislikes what I do, a letter asking them to please consider me again because maybe I’m better than I was when they’d last seen me some years back. It was a hard, begging, exposing letter. Like I was apologizing for not previously being good enough and pissing someone off. I blind-ccd my agent who said I had “nothing to lose”. Well, believe it or not, dignity and confidence do not lie in wait in some replenish-able VanceBucket. There is loss. So I was raw when I got there.

And the bartender says to me after soundcheck. “I work here 6 days a week. I see everything. On a whim I was riffling through the schedule to see who I had to listen to here and I saw your name and I haven’t been this excited to be behind the bar in a long time…” He and the other 2 bartenders were not at the bar when I was playing. They’d all taken seats in the back to see the show, basically doing rock paper scissors to see who would get up to serve someone.

After Steve Simpson's warm, perfect set in front of what I counted to be 11 Swannanoa Gathering Song School alumni and about 40 other folks I put on a set that I was proud of. I played everything from Hendrix to Gershwin, my stuff in-between.

This is not about bragging. Cheryl Wheeler says that when you perform the audience is in your care, but that ever so occasionally there are nights when the audience takes care of you. Thank you Evening Muse.

~ Bluffton, South Carolina, your intimate audience did not daunt me. Nor did Mary, about 85 years old, proud ex-CIA, approximately 5 feet tall. OK, she did surprise me though, particularly when she and her three friends leaned in to me as I sat with them during my break, looked to both sides surreptitiously, and shook their heads - “I just can’t see how we got here with this administration… as long as we can walk we’ll march against it!”... Look, I’m not going all political here, but it is so not what I expected from these octogenarian ladies. All I can say is look out.

~ Bolivia, North Carolina, playing to 150 people in your hall that seats 1,500 with a 20x 40 foot mesh covered orchestra pit and another 15 feet after that to the first row was daunting yet still fun. The room usually used for these folk shows was currently a FEMA center. Bravo to all involved. Pay what you want for CDs was the order of the evening. Thanks for the opportunity to sing at you, joke around a bit, and make your day lighter.

~ Some Facebook fans were annoyed by my earlier post about my seeing the road sign for Whiteville in NC and my subsequent winking admonishment to myself to “breathe and keep driving…” I guess they were uncomfortable with the jokey inference.

I guess I’m a race-rabble-rouser. Respectfully - whatevs.

I love Waze, the road mapping app. I avoid roadkill, potholes, hidden police, back-ups.
Sometime Waze takes me to secondary roads to avoid traffic related encumbrances.
Sometimes a house along one of these roads, like North Carolina RT218, has 10 x 5 Confederate flag on a 30 foot pole in their front yard.

Sometimes I have 2 to 4 black fans at a show. Always great fodder for me, and never fails to warm my heart.
Sometimes I no longer wonder why I’m broken and outspoken when one 50ish Black woman in particular, who drove 3 hours with her Black husband to see me, has her hair rubbed by an apparently quite sober patron because he thought it was “really cool”, like she was some sort of Standard Poodle. Her husband and I just stood in awed silence.

Sometimes I’m invisible when a man at the airport (whom I later overheard brag that his property was the one where Evil Dead 2 was filmed) comes up to a row of 6 connected Gate B2 chairs where 4 women sat, me on the end and an empty seat between us, and with his back to me and his butt in my face, asks the women if anyone was sitting in the open seat. Hey Bro, no wonder they filmed that movie at your house...

Yeah, joking will continue. Waze can’t steer me away from what many say no longer exists, nor from how I and many others deal with it in our day to day.

www.vancegilbert.com for more info how to get hold of me for private parties, music coaching, mollusk training, or how you can donate at various levels to my new CD!!

xovg