streets around the time of World War I. His arrangement of
Johnson's “God Moves On the Water” closely follows the origi-
nal 1929 recording but he may have heard various versions of
the song from other sources, for Lipscomb’s reference to John
Jacob Astor IV, who perished in the 1912 Titanic sinking, doesn’t
appear in Johnson’s recording. “Which Way Do the Red River
Run” is surely as old as any blues in Texas and a song Lipscomb
learned from oral tradition.
Lipscomb was known as a songster, a moniker often ap-
plied to the older generation of singer-guitarists who were
repositories of both blues and the sounds blues replaced. Brit-
ish blues scholar Paul Oliver described Lipscomb as “one of
the last great exponents of the Southern Negro folk song forms,
before the blues and the mass media which popularized it
swept them aside.” Lipscomb’s bucolic life of farming and
weekend music-making in Navasota was interrupted in 1960
when blues enthusiast Chris Strachwitz and Texas folklorist
Mack McCormick discovered and recorded him. Lipscomb was
the first artist on the Arhoolie label, and in later years he played
numerous folk festivals, clubs and coffee houses, appearances
which earned this dignified agrarian fans ranging from coun-
try singer-songwriters (Guy Clark) to ex-Presidents (Lyndon
Johnson attended Lipscomb’s 1972 appearance at the Kerrville
Folk Festival).
With Lipscomb we close this video with sounds from the
very source of the Texas blues guitar tradition, having first ex-
perienced two fiery urban bluesmen and their city-toughened
country mentor. The musical evolution represented in this hour
took the better part of a century to occur, and there are those
who will tell you it could only have happened in Texas. It’s a
state of vast cultural riches and Lone Star loyalists may sug-
gest it has something to do with strong bloodlines. Mance
Lipscomb told Jim Crockett (Guitar Player, March 1974) as
much: “My daddy was a fiddler,” he said, “and I heard music
all the time. Like, it’s in my blood. And blood is your life, right?
You can learn music easy if it’s in your blood.”

– Mark Humphrey

For help with background material, thanks to

Mary Katherine Aldin.