• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 768 0

the railroad station and ask Peg Leg. He can tell you.’ So, we went to the railroad station and Peg Leg told us his name was Mance Lipscomb and that he was probably cutting grass out on the highway, but he also told us where he lived. So, we couldn’t find him on the highway and we turned up at his house that evening and those recordings became the first release on Arhoolie Records.”24 Lipscomb subsequently enjoyed a starring role in the folk-blues revival, often paralleling Lightnin’s experiences and occasionally sharing the bill with him. While Lightnin’ and Lipscomb are often grouped together as exemplars of Texas country blues, their music was significantly different. Lipscomb was a songster and played finger-style guitar; his repertoire included folk songs, ballads, and dance tunes. Lightnin’ developed an emotive, single-string guitar style that reflected the commercially recorded blues artists of the 1920s and ‘30s.

After recording Mance Lipscomb on August 11, 1960, Strachwitz went to Memphis to meet up with Paul Oliver, who was traveling with his wife, Valerie, across the United States, supported by grants from the Foreign Specialists Program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States and the Council of Leaders and Specialists of the American Council of Education. Oliver, in addition to expanding his research of blues, was also conducting interviews for BBC Radio. “A past student of mine happened to have been made a program director,” Oliver says, “so we got in touch. He helped to arrange for me to have the equipment, which was difficult in those days … the one [tape recorder] I had belonged to the army, and the BBC had gotten it from the army. It was entirely in a khaki bag that was made to fit it. So I never did get to see what kind of tape recorder it was. It was all very concealed, being a military thing.”25

Oliver had corresponded with Strachwitz after reading his early article on Lightnin’, and together they went back to Texas, where Strachwitz introduced him to Lipscomb. But Oliver was especially interested in Lightnin’ because he was familiar with his records and wanted to interview him for his radio series and for the book he was then developing, titled Conversation with the Blues.26 “The interview was in the Third Ward,” Oliver says, “on the front door step basically of his house. We met there socially and independently with a couple of his friends. One of them, L. C. Williams, died very shortly after, a very nice young singer, and Long Gone Miles and Spider Kilpatrick.27 … I interviewed him [Lightnin’] I suppose for twenty minutes of actual time. But the amount of text from him was very limited. He was a kind of slow speaker. He’d just give an answer to a question, and then I’d have to reshape another question, and get another one sentence answer, and so on and so on. It wasn’t really flowing. My wife Val was there, and I think that seemed to reassure him in a sense. He was feeling safe without stress and so on. His wife brought us some coffee. It was very relaxed actually.”28

When Oliver completed the interview, he asked Lightnin’ to sign a release for the BBC, and then paid twenty-five dollars. Oliver says that he didn’t “want to tell him at the start that he was going to be paid, because I wanted him to speak honestly rather than because he was going to get some money.” On each of the next three days, Oliver met up with Lightnin’ and also went to see him perform at both Irene’s and the Sputnik, Third Ward bars where Lightnin’ was a regular. Oliver was amazed by Lightnin’s inventiveness and his ability to not only play both acoustic and electric guitars, but to “come up with different words and different themes. He seemed to have the capacity to improvise on the spot. He was great. He was playing acoustic at Irene’s, but he was playing electric at the Sputnik bar. Irene’s was a very little place. Sputnik bar was more a cafe-bar with tables. Irene’s was a bit cozier. You asked for a drink at Irene’s, whereas at the Sputnik, you could be served.”29

Although McCormick didn