Customer Reviews

I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman

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This is a book that has stayed with me long after I read it. Mance has a way of speaking very directly and has a storytellers flare for keeping his narratives interesting. I picked it up as a book on the blues but I remember it as a rare frank and fascinating conversation with a man from a very different social, political and racial reality. Seeing Les Blank's documentary "A Well Spent Life" will give you Mance's voice and enable you to read the dialect with ease. It makes me wish that someone would release a CD of Mance telling stories. Glen Alyn deserves credit for his courage to transcribe the dialect and for offering just the right amount of commentary before stepping aside.

No doubt Glen Alyn has done a lot of hard work putting this book together, but you do get the feeling this is not the best work on Mance Lipscomb imaginable. Lipscomb is a highly skilled story-teller and doesn't need the author's phonetic transcribtions to come across. If Alyn really wanted us to know about Mance's particular dialect, he should have had the book accompanied by a tape instead. Having said that, however, the book is still very entertaining, and at the end of the book we actually do have quite a clear understanding of Mance Lipscomb and the world he lived in

I thought that this book was very interesting from both the music standpoint and his everyday living. The vernacular spelling was neither trivializing or confusing, but it did slow down my reading of the book. The vernacular issue is something that plagues the oral history genre and seems to have no real good answer.

Lipscomb tends to be neglected in the memory of folks interest in the Blues and African American music. This book opens up a broad world in personal direct and real world terms. This is the world of the vast majority of Black folk in the Cotton South before World War II who sharecropped cotton on white-owned planations in areas center around small towns where the planation owners' word was superior to the law.
Lipscomb provides a picture not just of his musical life and interests but of his life as a cropper and as a laborer in later years. He also gives a from the inside view of what it was like to be a "rediscovered" Blues source during the folk revival of the 1960s.
What I loved about this book is his frank description of the country supper, the central venue from music in the origins of the Blues. Lipscomb's family would turn their home into a party place Saturday nights with extensive barbeque, cakes and pies, and homebrew for sale out side, and Mance would play his music and people with drink, dance, spark romances, and be free with love and laughter usually "til broad daylight." This was where the blues and much other Black music and culture arose and this you will see in intimate detail in this book.

Lipscomb is very good about the variety of musical influences that he grew up with in East Texas in the early 20th century. One of the more surprising things was the degree to which the commercial music industry reached his isolated country home. For example, he explains that the dances like the slow drag closely identified with the Blues came to his area with performers for the Barnum and Bailey Circus when they passed through. In those days, while rigidly whites-only in the big rings, Circuses carried Black musical and dance acts as part of the side show with the Black music and dances that swept the nation in the early 20th Century.
Reading the book is a bit hard because the interviewer uses non-standard spellings to approximate Lipscomb's pronounciation. I would image this might make it hard for someone not used to Black English or not used to the older forms that Lipscomb uses. A few more explanations of the share cropping system and its details would also help this book.

I think this is a book a reader will want to return to once having conquered it once, to read it more deeply for understanding a second time.