52 weeks of blues

Mance Lipscomb was a Texan songster who was ‘discovered’ during the blues revival of the 1960s. He could play a wide variety of styles, had a 50 year history of performing before being recorded and represents an important window to the older styles of music that developed into the blues.
He was born on April 9th, 1895, in the Bravos bottoms area of Burleson County, Texas, between the Bravos and Little Bravos Rivers near the town of Navasota. His parents were Jane, a Choctaw native Americans and Charles Lipscomb. Charles was an ex-slave from Alabama who was given the surname Lipscomb when he was sold to a Texan family of the same name. Mance was given the name “Bowdie Glenn”, or “Beau de Glen” or “Bodyglin”
The family were very musical – his father played the fiddle, an uncle played the banjo and his brothers played the guitar. When he was 11 his mother bought him his own guitar and he was soon accompanying his father at country suppers and dances. He was friends with an elderly man named Emancipation, and when the man died he adopted the name “Mance” in remembrance.
He quickly became a proficient musician and singer and was performing solo at “Saturday Night Suppers” and country dances in Brazos, Burleson, Grimes and Washington Counties. In the town of Brenham he befriended and performed with a blind guitarist Sam Rogers who taught him the “dead thumb” style of bass. He met and received some tuition from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson when they were performing in the local area.
He married Elnora in 1913 and they remained lifelong partners, producing a son, Mance Jr, and adopting 3 other children. He and his wife started hosting “Saturnight Suppers”, performing for the local community. In 1922 he was asked to tour with a fellow musician, but he declined, preferring to stay with his young family in Navasota. He remained based in the town all his life, working as a tenant farmer for various employers, playing music at night and the weekends. This was his life until the 1960s.
Texas in the 1920s and 1930s wasn’t known for its racial harmony. Segregation existed and black people were very much treated as second class citizens by a lot of the white population. Field labourers and farmers were very often exploited by white landowners. In 1956, Mance was working at the farm of Tom Moore, a notoriously mean landowner. One of Moore’s foremen abused Mance’s mother and wife, and Mance punched him in the face. Fearing for his life, Mance went into hiding. He went to Houston where he worked at a lumber yard during the day, and competed with Lightnin’ Hopkins, who he had met in 1938, for audiences in bars at night.
Compensation from a work place accident in the lumber yard gave Mance some money, and thinking that after 2 years the heat had died down, he returned to Navasota and bought himself a house and some land. He took a job at a road construction company, mowing lawns along the highways in Grimes County.
In 1959, blues researchers Mack McConnell and Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie records, heard about Mance while searching for Lightning Hopkins in Texas. They visited him, and Mance performed for them. Impressed with what they heard, in July and August the following year, they recorded Mance in the kitchen of his home. “Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster” became Arhoolie’s first release featuring 14 of the more than 40 songs recorded in these sessions.
This record made Mance central to the blues revival. Here was a bonafide, old style musician performing traditional country styles of music from his corner of Texas. Mance didn’t consider himself a bluesman; he considered himself a songster and had a massive variety of styles – ballads, rags, dance pieces, breakdowns, waltzes, one and two steps, slow drags, reels, and really old styles he named as ballin’ the jack, the buzzard lope, hop scop, buck and wing, heel and toe polka, as well as and popular, sacred, and secular songs. Audiences hadn’t seen any of these style before, and combined with Mance’s gentle nature and good humour, he because very popular.
In 1961 he recorded and released “Mance Lipscomb: Trouble in Mind”, and later that year performed in from of 40,000 at the Berkeley Folk Festival. 1964 saw the release of “Mance Lipscomb: Texas Songster Volume 2”. Volume 3 followed in 1965 – all up Arhoolie released 6 volumes in the series. In 1970 a documentary of Mance and his life title “A Well Spent Life” was released.
Mance suffered a stroke in 1974 which ended his recording days and further declining health meant he was in and out of hospitals and care. He died on January 30, 1976, in his beloved home town of Navasota is buried at West Haven Cemetery.

“Night time is the Right Time” is a blues standard that has interestingly evolved in two different directions. The original recording was done by pianist Roosevelt “The Honey Dripper” Sykes in 1937. It’s a solo piano piece with an A B C verse (ie three different lines) over a 12 bar. The song was credited to Sykes and Leroy Carr. though Carr died in 1935 with no known recordings of the song. Big Bill Broonzy recorded a guitar version in 1938 featuring slightly different lyrics, but the same 12 bar, A B C, structure.
In 1957 Nappy Brown recorded a very different version using a full band and a gospel group as backing singers. The verse structure and lyrics were completely redone, with a call and response line of “night and day” sung by the backing vocalists for each line from the lead singer. The following year Ray Charles recorded a similar version which became a big hit, and is generally the more common version nowdays.
Mance Lipscomb’s version is faithful to the structure of the original recordings in the 1930’s. It’s played in standard tuning around the key of F, so use a capo on the first or second fret to get it to sound the same as the recording. It retains the 12 bar structure of the original, though he drops the bar of the IV chord usually seen in the 10th bar, replacing it with the I chord.
The song features the “dead thumb” rhythm that is common for Texan guitarists. Your thumb hits the beat on the beat every beat. It is a constant in the background, never changing, never wavering.
The melody is quick and based around the open positions. In the lead sections he uses a 5th fret based A, in the verses its the standard open A7. The main thing to concentrate on is the speed and flow, you need to be quick, but the guitar lines need to flow under the voice. There’s a common riff played around an open E7 shape, but everything else is ure improvisation. It’s a great song for jamming – learn the first two verses and the solo, then just play it your way, using Mance’s chord positioning as a guide for making it your own!

E
Listen here baby, what I'm going to say to you
A7                                                                    E
I want you to know baby, I got the bye-bye blues
B                                       E
Night time is the right time, be with the one you love

When you're out late at night, baby I can't rest
Even the food I eat honey, baby it won't digest
Night time is the right time, be with the one you love

First solo

Grab my hat this morning, she followed me to the door
She said "Come back Daddy, you don't have to go"
Night time is the right time, be with the one you love, the one you love

Cried last night, cried the whole night long
Cried last night, I cried the whole night long
I didn’t miss my loved one, until she had gone

Second Solo

Yeah you ain't goin' miss your water, till your well go dry
Ain't gunna miss your loved one, until she say goodbye
Night time is the right time, be with the one you love, the one you love

Third Solo

Don't the moon look pretty, shining down through the trees?
I can see my woman, but she don't see me
Night time is the right time, be with the one you love, with the one you love

The intro gets straight into the quick melody lines played over the dead thumb bassline. A neat trick Mance does is to move from the open E to the 5th fret A in bars 4 and 5. He keeps the same basic fingering, but shifts it into a different harmonic structure.

The progression in similar to the intro, and Mance improvises around similar ideas. He really gets the melody separate from the bassline, it’s important to make sure your fingers aren’t accidentally brushing the strings to ensure the different voices of the instrument are isolated from each other. Only hit the notes you want to hit.
Verse 1
Verse 2

The solos all jam around similar themes. There’s some quick and tricky passages – I recommend you learn them as a guide then just improvise your own solos around the ideas.