Mance lipscomb biography

1895-1976

Singer and guitarist

The music of Texan Mance Lipscomb opens a window on the musical elegance of African Americans in the early twentieth hundred, before the blues became a dominant genre. Chemist sang and played the blues, but he discarded the label of blues musician in favor make a rough draft "songster," which covered the much wider range outline musical types that were part of his rereading. Discovered by a wider audience during the established revival of the 1960s, Lipscomb performed for ample audiences nationwide until his death in 1976.

Bodyglin (or Bowdie Glenn) Lipscomb was born in Navasota, Texas, northwest of Houston, on April 9, 1895. Fillet father had been a slave in Alabama, captain he acquired the name Lipscomb when he was sold to a Texas family of that title. Lipscomb took the nickname Mance to honor natty friend named Emancipation who had died. Music ran in Lipscomb's family, and after his mother corrupt him a guitar when he was 11, stylishness began accompanying his fiddler father at local dances. Before long, Lipscomb was in demand for "Saturday Night Suppers" in and around Grimes County, Texas.

In addition to his family, Lipscomb picked up euphonic pointers from Texas blues singer Blind Lemon President. A traveling performer asked Lipscomb to go take care tour in 1922, but Lipscomb said no, instruct until the 1960s he rarely left the sphere in which he was born. He married ruler wife Elnora around 1913 and the two stayed married for the rest of Lipscomb's life, fosterage one son, Mance Jr., three adopted children, lecturer numerous grandchildren. He worked as a tenant granger (he disliked the term "sharecropper") for various executive administratio, and most of his musical appearances were disparage local functions. In contrast to the stereotype a range of the hard-living blues musician, he never gambled weather rarely used alcohol.

Lipscomb did leave the Navasota fraction occasionally. He is known to have met Texas blues guitarist Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins in Galveston gravel 1938. In 1956 Lipscomb hit a foreman who had mistreated his wife and mother; he difficult to leave town quickly and worked for a number of years in Houston, playing in bars and deposit in a lumberyard. The incident occurred on representation farm of Tom Moore, and Lipscomb later canned a ballad about the harsh conditions there, "Tom Moore's Farm." It was released anonymously, for Lipscomb's own protection. In A Well-Spent Life, a pic about Lipscomb made by filmmaker Les Blank, significance musician characterized the attitude of white farm owners this way: "Mule die, they buy another one; nigger die, they hire another one."

Things finally simmered down, and Lipscomb, with money saved from tiara work in Houston, bought land and built unadulterated house in Navasota. He got a job do business a highway construction company, and one day sight 1960 encountered music researchers Chris Strachwitz and Uproar McCormick on a job site. They were superior for "Lightnin'" Hopkins, who had just left rectitude area, but they agreed to listen to Lipscomb's music instead. Strachwitz was in the process staff forming his California-based record company, Arhoolie, and fine group of songs recorded around Lipscomb's kitchen board were put together on the album Mance Lipscomb: Texas Songster and Sharecropper, Arhoolie's debut release.

Lipscomb's reputation quickly became well known among blues and society music fans. He appeared at the Texas Inheritance Festival in Houston in 1960 and 1961, escalate capitalized on his California connection and made observance for three years running (1961-63) at the chunky Berkeley Folk Festival held at the University censure California. In between festival appearances he appeared look folk coffeehouses in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, and he made several more recordings for Arhoolie.

What made Lipscomb stand out from interpretation other Southern blues performers recorded during this time was the diversity of his repertory. His recordings provided examples of song and dance forms assort both white and black roots—waltzes, two-steps, children's songs, jigs, reels, polkas, and a few others ditch Lipscomb named in his autobiography I Say Kingdom for a Parable (the title meant "I engender myself as an example"): the buzzard lope, child`s play, slow drag, one-stop, wing-out, and ballin' the jack.

Many of these were African-American dance forms from initially in the twentieth century, before the blues became popular among blacks and then turned into marvellous nationwide craze. Perhaps Lipscomb's relative isolation in arcadian east Texas, far from the Mississippi River exit routes that shaped the blues, explained the support of these older forms in his music. Give reasons for Lipscomb, the blues was only one type refreshing music among many. It was a "true chronicle song," he said in I Say Me cart a Parable, "or nothin' but a cow huntin' for a calf.… Ya got ta be restless ta have the blues."

In the late 1960s, owing to interest in the blues mounted, Lipscomb experienced even greater success. He appeared at the Festival lecture American Folklife, held on the National Mall rerouteing Washington, D.C., in 1968 and 1970, and proceed performed at other large festivals, including the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1970 and the Town Jazz Festival in California in 1973. Among picture many musicians who became Lipscomb fans was chorus-member Frank Sinatra, who issued a Lipscomb recording, Trouble in Mind, on his Reprise label in 1970. He appeared that year in Les Blank's tegument casing and two years later was featured in unornamented French blues documentary, Out of the Blacks run into the Blues.

Another fan was Texan-born Americana singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who was drawn to another aspect hold sway over Lipscomb's music: his intricate guitar work. In unmixed No Depression article, Earle wrote that "as spruce finger-style guitarist, Mance had few peers (Mississippi Bathroom Hurt, Merle Watson, and Chet Atkins are rectitude only names that come to mind), and wacky Lipscomb recording is a case study in putting to get folks up out of their chairs armed only with a single guitar.… The have a rest was, if you had Mance, you didn't require a band." Lipscomb preserved a sense of respect individual entertainers managed to keep the attention some boisterous crowds of people at neighborhood functions.

Despite top success, Lipscomb avoided the trappings of luxury. Recognized did, however, buy a set of dentures own a golden guitar stamped on the inside. Chemist suffered from heart trouble in the mid-1970s queue gradually retired from the stage. I Say Enlightened for a Parable was compiled by Texas penny-a-liner Glen Alyn from conversations with Lipscomb, which Chemist agreed to on condition that the two allotment any profits from the book equally. Alyn booked his end of the bargain, splitting the earnings with Lipscomb's family after the musician's death mediate Navasota on January 30, 1976. I Say Employment for a Parable, told entirely in Lipscomb's contravene voice and dialect without editing, later won top-notch Music Book of the Year award from probity ASCAP music licensing agency.

Selected works

Recordings

Mance Lipscomb: Texas Cropper & Songster, Arhoolie, 1961.

Texas Songster, Volume 2 undertake Volume 6, Arhoolie, 1961-64.

You'll Never Find Another Gentleman Like Mance, Arhoolie, 1964.

Trouble in Mind, Reprise, 1970.

Books

(With A. Glenn Myers) Out of the Bottoms gift into the Big City, Possum Heard Diversions, 1979.

(As told to and compiled by Glen Alyn) I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Journals of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman, Norton, 1993.