The music of Texan Mance Lipscomb opens a window on the musical culture of African Americans in the early twentieth century, before the blues became a dominant genre. Lipscomb sang and played the blues, but he rejected the label of blues musician in favor of "songster," which covered the much wider range of musical types that were part of his repertoire. Discovered by a wider audience during the folk revival of the 1960s, Lipscomb performed for large audiences nationwide until his death in 1976.
Bodyglin (or Bowdie Glenn) Lipscomb was born in Navasota, Texas, northwest of Houston, on April 9, 1895. His father had been a slave in Alabama, and he acquired the name Lipscomb when he was sold to a Texas family of that name. Lipscomb took the nickname Mance to honor a friend named Emancipation who had died. Music ran in Lipscomb's family, and after his mother bought him a guitar when he was 11, he began accompanying his fiddler father at local dances. Before long, Lipscomb was in demand for "Saturday Night Suppers" in and around Grimes County, Texas.
In addition to his family, Lipscomb picked up musical pointers from Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson. A traveling performer asked Lipscomb to go on tour in 1922, but Lipscomb said no, and until the 1960s he rarely left the area in which he was born. He married his wife Elnora around 1913 and the two stayed married for the rest of Lipscomb's life, raising one son, Mance Jr., three adopted children, and numerous grandchildren. He worked as a tenant farmer (he disliked the term "sharecropper") for various employers, and most of his musical appearances were at local functions. In contrast to the stereotype of the hard-living blues musician, he never gambled and rarely used alcohol.
Lipscomb did leave the Navasota area occasionally. He is known to have met Texas blues guitarist Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins in Galveston in 1938. In 1956 Lipscomb hit a foreman who had mistreated his wife and mother; he had to leave town quickly and worked for several years in Houston, playing in bars and working in a lumberyard. The incident occurred on the farm of Tom Moore, and Lipscomb later recorded a ballad about the harsh conditions there, "Tom Moore's Farm." It was released anonymously, for Lipscomb's own protection. In A Well-Spent Life, a documentary about Lipscomb made by filmmaker Les Blank, the musician characterized the attitude of white farm owners this way: "Mule die, they buy another one; nigger die, they hire another one."
Things finally simmered down, and Lipscomb, with money saved from his work in Houston, bought land and built a house in Navasota. He got a job with a highway construction company, and one day in 1960 encountered music researchers Chris Strachwitz and Mack McCormick on a job site. They were looking for "Lightnin'" Hopkins, who had just left the area, but they agreed to listen to Lipscomb's music instead. Strachwitz was in the process of forming his California-based record company, Arhoolie, and a group of songs recorded around Lipscomb's kitchen table were put together on the album Mance Lipscomb: Texas Songster and Sharecropper, Arhoolie's debut release.
Lipscomb's name quickly became well known among blues and folk music fans. He appeared at the Texas Heritage Festival in Houston in 1960 and 1961, then capitalized on his California connection and made appearances for three years running (1961-63) at the large Berkeley Folk Festival held at the University of California. In between festival appearances he appeared at folk coffeehouses in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, and he made several more recordings for Arhoolie.
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