Mance Lipscomb
(1895-1976)
“Now when I get to playin’ I go out of the bounds of reason
because when I start, I don’t like to stop. As long as it look like
they payin’ attention to me, I can play all night for them.”
Mance Lipscomb, interviewed by Glen MyersLipscomb played countless Saturday nights from sunset
to sunup Sunday at country dances around Navasota, Texas.
Unlike Hopkins, entertaining wasn’t Lipscomb’s livelihood; he
was a tenant farmer most of his life who took pride in his
music but regarded it as a release, a social bond with his com-
munity and a means to a few extra dollars. He wouldn’t ‘turn
professional’ until he was 65!
The songs Lipscomb performs here in a set recorded at the
University of Washington in 1968 show the range of influences
available to a man who lived his entire life in a farming com-
munity in Southeast Texas. “Captain, Captain” is essentially a
worksong learned from an ex-convict who did some work for
Lipscomb’s mother, an echo of the sounds which inspired the
earliest blues. The later influence of recordings in evidenced
by “Night Time Is the Right Time,” recorded by Big Bill Broonzy
in 1938. Mance remembered encountering Blind Willie
Johnson, a much-traveled `guitar evangelist,’ on Navasota
Photo by George Pickow