Foy Vance: The Homebird's Chorus

Belfast's streets used to be war zones. Its population suffered through curfews, car bombs and religious murders. It ushered the word terrorist into the spoken lexicon. But the city has gone fairly quiet these last 10 years. It's beautiful in fact, thriving economically and drawing more tourists than ever. Even so, an aftershock lingers: three decades of havoc inflict deep wounds on a people's spirit, even when the death counts drop and the machine-gun murals are painted over. This story is about a son of Belfast who sings the city's hope tucked inside lament.

I met Charlie on a sunny June night in Belfast. I’d been roaming around, passing the long-light hours before a small, unlisted show by a local-done-good songwriter named Foy Vance, about whom I knew almost nothing. I hadn’t even confirmed the location of his oddly hush-hush concert. I knew he’d performed with The Ulster Orchestra in Belfast a month prior, jamming with the 70-piece company on the river. I knew locals pronounced his name “Five Ants,” but I’d only heard a couple songs. I had a hunch, though, that the guy mattered here. His voice had Solomon Burke’s expressiveness, and his melodies unfolded methodically. I figured this city and that sound could be like the blues.

Plus, I enjoyed the wandering. Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter—blocks of renewed citylife, boutiques and tapas bars and quaint alleys with red flowers in window boxes—felt serene and happy. I strolled along with the contentment of a man whose pockets sagged heavy with quarters. The city invited a long stroll—especially down to the River Lagan, where bygone tallships moored up 
for a festival; where sat Belfast’s newly iconic landmark, a school-bus-sized blue fish begging for a tourist’s photo; and where the waterfront amphitheater hosted the orchestra and large events. Belfast seemed a small Seattle.

Around nine, I stopped into a snug pub called The Spaniard. The sun was still stubbornly hanging on, dropping its dullest cloudy light over the city. Charlie sat with three friends—Jim, Mary and Peter—by the windows up front, and within ten minutes the sixtysomethings pulled me up a chair to join them and bought me another pint. The pub hardly looked Irish: Record covers and vinyl EPs and LPs were stapled to the ceiling and walls. A lone goldfish swam in a bowl on the bar. Wax spilled out of empty wine bottles. And odd things hung from the ceiling, like a bright-blue satin leg. Hello Dali.

Charlie looked like a seafarer, though his friend Jim told me he was a former BBC reporter and editor with 20 years on the crime beat. His hair—wily, white and boyishly unkempt—sprang from his scalp. His clothes looked faded and worn, the bachelor-on-a-budget sort. And his face had wrinkle, blotch and rosiness in a handsome way. Most of his writing days behind him, Charlie ran a nonprofit now, restoring old ships and boatyards, things having to do with the city’s era of vast ship-building and the Titanic. Jim was involved, too. A skilled painter and watercolorist, Jim’s thematic base was the old shipyards and the men who worked for Harland and Wolff.

“You should come see his prints,” Charlie said repeatedly. “Come down to the Lagan. He’s really captured the way it was.” Charlie’s pride in Jim was apparent.

“I can’t even draw a horse,” I said.

“Horses are very difficult,” Jim said, sitting up, wine-stained lips and teeth flashing as he spoke. Then he took out a pen and grabbed two napkins and began to draw. Charlie watched closely.

“One of his paintings shows the Titanic about to leave with a man smoking a cigarette in the foreground,” Charlie said. “They’re just beautiful.”

I studied Charlie’s words, the way they came out, so crisp, almost metallic, founded and solid. Everything that he said seemed crucial. He had the trademark melodic lilt, but his words also held a sound both bitter and energetic. Charlie made you listen. And he was not short on things to say about his home.

“This is a bent country,” he told me as Jim finished the sketch. “There’s a walking wounded here.”

“Ah, there you go,” Jim said, handing me the drawn horse, mid-stride and fluid. He looked up, very pleased to give the small token.

“Now, you remember that,” Charlie said to me, “That’s very, very special.”

Foy Vance is one of the whitest people I’ve ever seen. Even on an island full of white people, he’s really white. Jack White white, except shiny bald. And he digs hats—driving hats, newsboy hats, felt snap-brims. But when you hear him sing, especially in-person, you swear this white-boy Irishman belongs on some heart-pine front porch in the Delta. There’s a blues sound lingering around the edge of most of his songs, and a folky spirituality runs through him.

“The first music I remember was American Gospel,” Vance tells me the next morning over tea in an empty café ten miles outside of Belfast. He speaks softly in a voice that has yet to fully awake. Though he grew up in Bangor, Northern Ireland, a sea town just east of Belfast in County Down, Vance spent chunks of his childhood in the American South. Up ’til the age of seven, he journeyed with his preacher father throughout Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alabama. “When we would go on trips, Dad would teach at the black churches—this when some towns had signs saying, ‘No blacks after dark.’ I remember their music was just infectious, so sensory. A line-and-response thing, the whole congregation of Amens.”

Vance’s spirituality swoops in and out of his 2007 release, Hope—15 songs recorded in a Mourne Mountain cottage. Just he and piano player Jules Maxwell. The album springs from and back to the songwriter’s sense of humanity and faith, a lightness of being found in Vance’s story-driven lyrics. In “Gabriel and the Vagabond” and “Indiscriminate Act of Kindness,” the down-and-out meet angelic benefactors who offer provision and wisdom in whispers.

“My father was a man of huge generosity,” Vance says. “Someone on the street might say they liked his tie, and he’d take it off and give it to them.” His father, who left the Church when Foy was still a kid, seems to have existed outside the strictures of Ireland’s Catholic-Protestant divide. He loved the pub and loved the people, Vance remembers. “He was more real than his religion allowed him to be. There’s something of him in everything I do. He was an eternally hopeful character. It wasn’t until the day he died that I really started writing songs.”