"Mance Lipscomb was a sage, a
songster, and a self-made man. He played so many types of music with
powerful conviction...He brought the past to the present and turned the
present into story, into song and into life."
Taj Mahal
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.
Mance Lipscomb represented one of the last remnants of the
19th century songster tradition, 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
and
rags.
Also included were
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), as well as 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.
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. 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 Johnson
and early country star Jimmie Rodgers, he did not
make recordings until his "discovery" by whites during the folk-song
revival of the 1960s.