Mance Lipscomb - Navasota Extended Liner Notes
MANCE LIPSCOMB LONG NOTES
Mance Lipscomb was 65 years old when he made his first recordings, but you’d never guess it from their vitality. At an age when quite a few musicians exit the road, ready to hang up their instruments and take life a little easier during their golden years, the veteran Texas guitarist was at the peak of his music-making powers and about to commence a long-overdue rendezvous with stardom. From then on, Mance made the most of the time he had left on this earth, delighting audiences coast-to-coast with his highly distinctive approach to the blues and related genres for just shy of a decade-and-a-half.
Born April 9, 1895 outside of Navasota, Texas with the unwieldy handle of Bodyglin Lipscomb (his surname reflected that of the man who owned his father and grandfather during slavery days; he understandably opted to switch his first name to Mance, borrowing it from a friend of his eldest brother after mercifully abandoning “Crackshot” and “Pots” as nicknames), he didn’t pursue a recording contract to expose his artistry to the masses until June of 1960, when Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz and musicologist Mack McCormick tracked him down at his rural abode near where he was born.
To provide perspective on his place in the blues hierarchy, Mance was born only a few years after pre-war pioneers Charley Patton and Lonnie Johnson, and a couple of years before fellow Lone Star legend Blind Lemon Jefferson, who began recording back in 1926 and had been absent from the planet for more than three decades when Lipscomb belatedly turned up. The acoustic blues revival was proceeding full speed ahead as the ‘60s commenced, and Mance would be one of its greatest discoveries.
Just because he hadn’t recorded obscenely rare 78s for Paramount or OKeh during the pre-war era didn’t mean Mance’s wide-ranging repertoire wasn’t rooted in the same fertile soil as those of his long-gone contemporaries, or on an exalted par with them artistically. As McCormick’s introductory liner notes on Lipscomb’s Arhoolie debut LP stated, strictly classifying Mance as a bluesman did him a profound disservice. He was more accurately described as a songster whose approach to his craft began to develop even before the blues solidified as an idiom.
This compilation, consisting entirely of performances captured live in concert during the memorable years after his national emergence, testifies that Lipscomb was a genuine blues master. His intricate finger-picked guitar technique provided vivid, relentless accompaniment for his supremely atmospheric vocals. But a typical Lipscomb set list also encompassed hoary Tin Pan Alley ditties that weren’t old when he originally learned them placed alongside reels, breakdowns, patriotic themes, and slide-soaked gospel pieces. Of course, each and every one was rendered in his own inimitable style.
Strachwitz and McCormick had come across a true Texas original worthy of crowing about. Instead of performing at parties, picnics, and dances around his homebase as he’d been doing for nearly half a century, Lipscomb would quickly become a beloved fixture on the lucrative festival and coffeehouse circuit following the emergence of his debut Arhoolie set and a follow-up long-player produced by McCormick the next year for Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records (of all labels). He wouldn’t have to duck the stray bullet or dodge the occasional vicious fistfight in his newly adopted environs, as he had a few times too often around Navasota when the partying got a little too hearty.
Those prestigious new venues were like nirvana when compared to Lipscomb’s backbreaking younger days of picking cotton in the sizzling Lone Star sun. Mance hailed from a musical family; his father was a talented fiddler, and his mother, partly of Native American descent, liked to sing. Mance’s siblings Ralph and Charlie played guitar as well. An older local resident, Sam Collins, picked some mean guitar and helped to inspire Mance to pick up the instrument. So did the itinerant duo of Richard Dean and Hamp Walker, who sometimes based themselves in Navasota and mesmerized young Lipscomb when he was eight or nine years old.
Despite his budding talent on guitar, Mance nearly gave it all up in his mid-teens in order to embrace religion. That career detour was averted because local church elders wrongfully suspected Lipscomb of continuing to pick his sinful axe when he wasn’t in the pews and expelled him from their holy ranks. We can be glad they did; their misguided loss was the blues world’s great gain. Mance wouldn’t hang up his axe again until shortly before his passing; he held down a physically exhausting day job for most of his life but continued to play for a little extra money on weekends.
Lipscomb crossed paths with a host of intriguing figures early in his life. Frank Hamer, for instance. As the city marshal of Navasota, Hamer became friendly with Mance, then in his early teens, long before the gun-toting lawman led the posse that killed famous bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in May of 1934. Lipscomb had an opportunity to check out Blind Lemon Jefferson in the flesh on Dallas’ Deep Ellum Street in 1917, and he saw Jefferson perform several more times after that. When slide guitar wizard Blind Willie Johnson visited Navasota in 1916, Mance tuned his guitar for him.
No less a revered country music luminary than Jimmie “The Singing Brakeman” Rodgers invited Lipscomb to join him on the road in 1922, but Mance sensibly turned him down. Not only had he been married for nearly a decade by then to his lifelong sweetheart Elnora and thus dedicated to remaining close to home, Mance surely realized that being half of a racially mixed duo barnstorming the South could have been a dangerous strategy in those fiercely segregated days.
Instead, Mance confined his playing to Saturday night suppers and the like, developing a complex style of finger-picked guitar that blended rollicking bass lines with melodic chords and stinging fills. He usually played solo and was proud of his remarkable endurance as he gladly churned out music to dance and party to all night long and right into the next morning. A switch to electric guitar at one point showed that Lipscomb tried his best to remain contemporary, but he reverted to a strictly acoustic presentation at the time of his discovery. The old days had become new again; Mance had no problem whatsoever embracing folk-blues once more to please a new demographic.
Despite his musical talent, menial labor was Mance’s primary pre-1960 method of eking out a living. Not just cotton picking; Lipscomb also toiled as a farmer and tractor driver over the decades. There were a couple of years during the mid-‘50s when Mance and Elnora relocated to Houston to take a job at a lumber company, but a work accident there temporarily put him out of commission. At least there was a monetary settlement as a result of the mishap, enough to allow Mance to build a home for himself and his wife back in Navasota.
That’s where Strachwitz and McCormick found him. They’d been steered in his general direction by a local celebrity of sorts: Tom Moore, a powerful landowner immortalized by fellow Texas blues guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins’ brutal “Tim Moore’s Farm,” an unlikely national R&B hit in 1949 on the Modern label (Mance first crossed paths with Lightnin’ back in 1938 or thereabouts when Lipscomb went to see Hopkins perform at a Galveston juke joint). Considering how unflattering Hopkins’ portrayal of him was in his hit, it’s remarkable that Moore even gave Strachwitz and McCormick the time of day, much less any help on tracking down another potentially hostile bluesman. Moore was unaware of precisely where Mance was, but he pointed the enterprising pair towards a helpful gent named Pegleg at a nearby railroad station that did send them in the right direction.
Chris and Mack weren’t interested in hearing their find play a newfangled electric guitar. They handed him Strachwitz’s acoustic Harmony model, set up their trusty mobile recording equipment, and sat back as Lipscomb laid a whopping 23 songs on tape that first bountiful evening. The duo returned that August for some more intimate living room sessions—enough to masterfully load up Lipscomb’s all-important debut album, Texas Sharecropper and Songster, which hit the record shelves as Arhoolie’s maiden release before the end of the year. The critically acclaimed LP immediately tabbed Mance as a major acoustic blues discovery.
The folk music crowd took immediate interest in the late-blooming newcomer. Mance was booked for the 1961 Berkeley Folk Festival, where he shared the bill with the legendary Pete Seeger. Trouble in Mind, his ‘61 encore LP for Reprise, got him a taste of major label exposure, which didn’t hurt either. That same year brought Lipscomb co-starring gigs at the University of California Folk Music Festival and the Berkeley Folk Festival. In years to come, he proceeded to delight audiences at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and Town Hall in New York City, and he dazzled the faithful fans that packed the 1965 edition of the Newport Folk Festival.
Even more rarified was the dining hall of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the location where the entirety of this collection’s first disc was taped for posterity in 1972. Mance featured plenty of tried-and-true blues themes in his presentation (rendered entirely his way, of course), notably “See See Rider,” “Baby Please Don’t Go,” and “Rock Me Baby.” But interspersed too were the ancient artifacts “Alabama Jubilee” and “Shine On Harvest Moon,” and Mance concluded his show with the sanctified “True Religion” and a rousing “When The Saints Go Marching On,” where he broke out his pocketknife to peel off some wicked slide riffs.
Much the same mesmerizing musical variety distinguishes the second disc, culled from concerts at the University of Houston on March 2, 1963 and January 24, 1964 as well as performances taped in Navasota in ‘64. “Diddy Wah Diddy,” “Willy Poor Boy,” and “Mama Don’t Allow” plow decidedly playful ground, but once again there’s plenty of straightahead blues content as well. Mance launches into the hard-driving “Night Time Is The Right Time,” a tough “So Different Blues,” a surprisingly upbeat “Trouble In Mind,” the rolling “Blues In G,” and a rare foray into postwar material via a revival of John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen.”
“The Titanic” is an epic story song full of riveting detail, while “Ain’t It Hard” strikes an ominous minor-key tone and “Johnny Take A One On Me” hurtles along with irresistible gusto. All were sparked by Lipscomb’s dexterous fretwork (exhibited particularly persuasively throughout the lovely instrumental “Rag In F”) and hearty singing that never failed to bely his age. As was his longstanding practice, Lipscomb changed his tuning to play stinging slide on a deeply moving “Motherless Children.”
In 1974, illness ended Mance Lipscomb’s late-life stint in the sun; he never really resumed his musical activities after suffering a stroke. He died January 30, 1976 in Navasota, remaining true to his lifelong homebase and his singular musical vision to the very end. --Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Blues Records 1943-1970 “The Bible of the Blues,” Volume Two L-Z, by Mike Leadbitter, Leslie Fancourt and Paul Pelletier (London, UK: Record Information Services, 1994)
Blues Who’s Who, by Sheldon Harris (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991)
I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb Texas Bluesman, by Glen Alyn (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1993)
Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mance_Lipscomb