Mance Lipscomb: An Appreciation
Or, Notes From Someone Who Just Got Here
Credit where it's due: Nancy found him. Earlier this year she came home from Goodwill with a copy of Mance Lipscomb, Volume 5 on Arhoolie, five bucks or thereabouts. She has the ears in our house. I first heard the name Lightnin' Hopkins in high school, from the R.E.M. song on Document, but I didn't actually listen to the man until Nancy sorted me out decades later. He's probably my favorite blues guy now. I put Mance on and was charmed within a song or two. That's the first thing to know about this essay: it's written by someone a few months into this music, not by an expert. I'm writing to figure out what I heard.
Last weekend we were in San Francisco and made the usual pilgrimage to Amoeba on Haight. I normally head straight for the experimental section. This time I went straight to the blues and came out with You Got to Reap What You Sow as a $5 cutout, an out-of-print Rhino Handmade reissue of Trouble in Mind for $25 with twice the tracks of the original, and a used Mississippi Fred McDowell disc on Rounder for another five. I walked out thinking the blues were underpriced in that store. I'll come back to that.
Two days later I had all three discs going and was reading everything about Lipscomb I could find online. After a while the web pages started repeating each other, sometimes word for word, and disagreeing on details. Two sources stood out: a long interview with Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie and first recorded Mance in 1960, and a personal page by Michael Birnbaum, a young guitarist who became Mance's friend and occasional stage partner in the sixties. Most of what follows comes from those two, plus the records.
The gentle one
Hearing these records back to back is what got me thinking. McDowell's home recordings from Como, Mississippi, are fierce: the slide cries, the vocals are close to hollering, and "Frisco Line" hit me hard. Howlin' Wolf, whom I've been working through on the Smokestack Lightning box, is intense in a different way, with that huge voice and a band that sounds like it could knock down a wall. Then there's Mance.
"Gentle" isn't quite the right word. His rhythm never lets up, and his thumb keeps a bass line going under everything. But next to McDowell and Wolf he sounds warm, unhurried and easy. He isn't making a case to you. He's playing for you.
I think the reason is how he saw himself. He was a farmer, and according to the Handbook of Texas he objected to being called a sharecropper; he preferred "farmer." Music was what he did on weekends, at Saturday suppers and country dances, playing all night so people could dance. He reportedly knew some 350 songs, and a repertoire that size makes sense when you have to keep a room going until morning. Strachwitz tells of Mance playing the same new song over and over through a whole night, fast and then slow, because that's what the dancers wanted. In a handwritten autobiography Mance prepared for Birnbaum's guitar students, he lists the hard work first, starting as a boy, and then says music made his life better. The music supported the life, not the other way around.
That explanation only goes so far, though. McDowell also worked farms during the week and played house parties on weekends, and he sounds nothing like Mance. Region, the players each man learned from, and temperament all mattered. Strachwitz describes Mance as calm and courteous, and I suspect a good part of the gentleness was simply who he was. He also wasn't naive about his craft; he considered himself a serious musician and took pride in doing it right.
The deviation
Here's a small example of that pride. Strachwitz recalls that Pete Welding, the critic, once "fixed" Mance's guitar to standard pitch as a favor. Mance tuned it right back to where his ear told him it belonged.
I found this out the hard way. I picked up Nancy's bass to play along with one of the CDs and couldn't make it fit; I was just slightly off from the record. There are technical explanations (tape speed, capos, transfers), but I'd rather take the lesson from the Welding story. After a song or two I put the bass away and let Mance be where he was.
What the tidy version leaves out
The standard biography goes: born in 1895 near Navasota, Texas, farmed for decades, discovered in 1960, then festivals, records, a film, and honors. It isn't wrong, but it's smooth, and the first-hand accounts are much more interesting.
Take the discovery. Strachwitz and his partner Mack McCormick had gone to Navasota looking for musicians, and McCormick had an unusual lead: "Tom Moore's Farm," a song Lightnin' Hopkins had recorded that criticizes a real local landowner. As Strachwitz tells it, they walked into a store, asked about Tom Moore, and ended up asking Moore himself who the best musician in town was. That led them, through a man called Peg Leg, to Mance. Strachwitz admits his memory may be off and that Mance told it differently, but either way the irony is remarkable. Mance recorded his own version of the song and asked that it not be released during his lifetime. McCormick put it out in England anyway. Most biographies skip that, along with the later story of Mance being asked to play it at a party with a Moore relative present, and carefully choosing only the safe verses.
Then there's the hardship that the summaries reduce to "he remained poor." Strachwitz describes stopping at a roadside café on the drive home from Berkeley, where Mance was sent to eat in the kitchen and calmly explained the situation to his startled white companion. Birnbaum mentions that Mance paid for motels on tour, which cut into what he took home, and that he began staying with Birnbaum's family, at one point sleeping on a narrow hallway bed. None of this fully explains why a man so admired earned so little. The economics of the folk revival deserve a more careful look than any of these pages give it, and more than I can give it here.
My favorite detail comes from Birnbaum. When Mance was around 70, he asked Birnbaum to play him a song from Sing Out!, the folk-revival magazine. It was something in a completely different style, maybe an English ballad, that Mance had heard another singer do and wanted to learn because it was "purdy." The supposedly pure rural songster was learning from the magazine his own fans were reading. I've caught myself calling McDowell's home recordings more "authentic" than his polished ones, and this story reminds me that the people who carry a tradition were never sealed off from the world.
Versions
The sources don't agree about Mance. His given name appears as Bowdie Glenn, Beau De Glen, and other spellings. One account says "Mance" came from an old man nicknamed Emancipation; another says it came from a friend of his older brother. He got his first guitar at 11, or 14, or by 15. At least two cemeteries are named as his resting place. His own handwritten autobiography says he was discovered in 1961, a year after Strachwitz recorded him. I've stopped treating this as a flaw in the record. He came from a tradition in which songs lived in memory and changed with each performance, and it seems fitting that his biography works the same way.
One detail worked out in our favor. Birnbaum writes that he played second guitar on "Baby, You Don't Have to Go," recorded in Berkeley in 1969 for Volume 5, the album Nancy found. In a 1971 letter, Mance told him that people loved that track. So Nancy's five-dollar Goodwill record includes Mance's friend, and Mance himself was proud of it.
Why did he reach me this way?
Everyone who knows Mance seems to rate him highly, so it's fair to ask why more people don't know him. I have guesses, not answers. He left no records from the twenties or thirties for the revival to rediscover and build a legend around, the way it did with Mississippi John Hurt or Son House. His records came out on a small label, and Strachwitz says the one major-label album, Trouble in Mind on Reprise, didn't sell. He called himself a songster rather than a bluesman, which doesn't fit neatly in a record bin. As far as I know, no rock star turned one of his songs into a hit, the way the Stones did for McDowell and Wolf. His style may also have been harder to place for audiences who heard blues authenticity in intensity. And his recording career was short: it started when he was sixty-five and was over by the mid-seventies.
A narrower question is easier for me to answer: how did he get to me? Hopkins reached me twice, first as a name in an R.E.M. song and then, decades later, as music through Nancy. McDowell and Wolf had well-traveled roads into the rock canon. Mance came as a five-dollar LP from Goodwill that Nancy happened to spot. Then, at Amoeba, the prices made no sense in the best way. The out-of-print Rhino Handmade Trouble in Mind cost five times as much as the cutout sitting near it, and a Fred McDowell home recording was priced the same as the cutout. Price, rarity, reputation, and how much the music moved me seemed to have nothing to do with each other. That's what I meant by underpriced. It isn't only a bargain. It's how someone in 2026 can walk into a huge body of music for about fifteen dollars.
His reputation lasts mainly among people who play. Birnbaum learned Mance's style by slowing down the first record and working through it note by note, and guitarists still study it.
What I haven't read yet
This essay has a large gap. Glen Alyn's I Say Me for a Parable is Mance's life told in his own words, collected over years of conversations, and I haven't read it. I ordered it while writing this, and the paperback runs around 500 pages. I also haven't seen Les Blank's A Well Spent Life. What I've said about how Mance saw himself comes from Strachwitz's memories, Birnbaum's page, a couple of letters, and one handwritten page for guitar students.
Some of this will probably need revising once I've read the book, and that's fine. For now I have a handful of records, several versions of the story that don't agree, and the luck that so much of this music still turns up in the five-dollar bins. Nancy found Mance first, and I'm still catching up.