Description
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mance Lipscomb of Navasota, Texas had never put his music to wax before. But that was remedied when Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz and blues historian/folklorist Mack McCormick found Lipscomb after quite a search.
And on a borrowed guitar, Lipscomb laid down 23 complete songs on tape in one evening. 1960’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster marked both the label and artist’s debut, followed the next year (on a different label) by Trouble in Mind, with more to come.
Lipscomb hit the road to play for appreciative audiences in clubs, campuses, theaters and coffeehouses (including the Berkeley Folk Festival and the Newport Folk Festival). Several of those shows have been unearthed and now released in the 2CD set Navasota.
Disc one features a performance at Harvard University in 1972, and Disc two combined material from two Texas shows at the University of Houston in 1963 and 1964, as well as other material recorded in Navasota. It’s mostly just Lipscomb, his voice, and an acoustic guitar.
