Mance Lipscomb (1895-1976), guitarist and songster, was
born to Charles and Jane Lipscomb on April 9, 1895, in the
Brazos bottoms near Navasota, Texas, where he lived most
of his life as a tenant farmer. His father was an Alabama
slave who acquired the surname Lipscomb when he was sold
to a Texas family of that name. Lipscomb dropped his given
name, Bowdie Glenn, and named himself Mance when a friend,
an old man called Emancipation, passed away. Lipscomb and
Elnora, his wife of sixty-three years, had one son, Mance
Jr., three adopted children, and twenty-four grandchildren.
Lipscomb represented one of the last remnants of the nineteenth-century
songster tradition, which predated the development of the
blues. Though songsters might incorporate blues into their
repertoires, as did Lipscomb, they performed a wide variety
of material in diverse styles, much of it common to both
black and white traditions in the South, including ballads,
rags, dance pieces (breakdowns, waltzes, one and two steps,
slow drags, reels, ballin' the jack, the buzzard lope, hop
scop, buck and wing, heel and toe polka), and popular, sacred,
and secular songs. Lipscomb himself insisted that he was
a songster, not a guitarist or "blues singer,"
since he played "all kinds of music." His eclectic
repertoire has been reported to have contained 350 pieces
spanning two centuries. (He likewise took exception when
he was labeled a "sharecropper" instead of a "farmer.")
Lipscomb was born into a musical family and began playing
at an early age. His father was a fiddler, his uncle played
the banjo, and his brothers were guitarists. His mother
bought him a guitar when he was eleven, and he was soon
accompanying his father, and later entertaining alone, at
suppers and Saturday night dances. Although he had some
contact with such early recording artists as fellow Texans
Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnsonqqv and early
country star James Charles (Jimmie) Rodgers,qv he did not
make recordings until his "discovery" by whites
during the folk-song revival of the 1960s.
Between 1905 and 1956 he lived in an atmosphere of exploitation,
farming as a tenant for a number of landlords in and around
Grimes County, including the notorious Tom Moore, subject
of a local topical ballad. He left Moore's employ abruptly
and went into hiding after he struck a foreman for abusing
his mother and wife. Lipscomb's own rendition of "Tom
Moore's Farm" was taped at his first session in 1960
but released anonymously (Arhoolie LP 1017, Texas Blues,
Volume 2), presumably to protect the singer. Between 1956
and 1958 Lipscomb lived in Houston, working for a lumber
company during the day and playing at night in bars where
he vied for audiences with Texas blues great Sam "Lightnin'"
Hopkins,qv whom Lipscomb had first met in Galveston in 1938.
With compensation from an on-the-job accident, he returned
to Navasota and was finally able to buy some land and build
a house of his own. He was working as foreman of a highway-mowing
crew in Grimes County when blues researchers Chris Strachwitz
of Arhoolie Records and Mack McCormick of Houston found
and recorded him in 1960.
His encounter with Strachwitz and McCormick marked the beginning
of over a decade of involvement in the folk-song revival,
during which Lipscomb won wide acclaim and emulation from
young white audiences and performers for his virtuosity
as a guitarist and the breadth of his repertoire. Admirers
enjoyed his lengthy reminiscences and eloquent observations
regarding music and life, many of which are contained in
taped and written materials in the Mance Lipscomb-Glenn
Myers Collection in the archives and manuscripts section
of the Barker Texas History Centerqv at the University of
Texas at Austin. He made numerous recordings and appeared
at such festivals as the Berkeley Folk Festival of 1961,
where he played before a crowd of more than 40,000. In clubs
Lipscomb often shared the bill with young revivalists or
rock bands. He was also the subject of a film, A Well-Spent
Life (1970), made by Les Blank. Despite his popularity,
however, he remained poor. After 1974 declining health confined
him to a nursing home and hospitals. He died in Grimes Memorial
Hospital, Navasota, on January 30, 1976, and was buried
at West Haven Cemetery.
