Mance Lipscomb: a short biography
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. Mance lived most of his life in Navasota farming as a tenant for a number of landlords in and around Grimes County. Lipscomb dropped his given name, Bowdie Glenn, and named himself Mance when a friend, an old man called Emancipation, passed away.
His mother was half Choctaw Indian and his father was an Alabama slave who acquired the surname Lipscomb when he was sold to a Texas family of that name.
Mance Lipscomb was born into a musical family. By the time he was eleven, he was playing with his father at suppers and Saturday night dances.
Mance represented one of the last remnants of the nineteenth-century songster tradtion that predated the development of the blues. Mance did not make recordings until his "discovery" during the folk-song revival of the 1960s. He wrote a brief autobiography in 1967, outlining the highlights of his life.
Lipscomb and Elnora, his wife of sixty-three years, had one son, Mance Jr., three adopted children, and twenty-four grandchildren.
Mance Lipscomb also had two children with Isabel Lockett, a daughter Virginia and a son John.
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