MANCE LIPSCOMB - SONGSTER BORN 120 YEARS AGO TODAY

He may be a minor figure in the story of the blues, but he's an interesting one, and one the very young Bob Dylan met, and their repertoires connect in several ways.

Here's my entry on him in  The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Lipscomb, Mance [1895 - 1976]

In his 1965 book Conversation With the Blues, Paul Oliver makes the point that ‘if the blues, like any folk art or indeed almost any art form, is illuminating in terms of a whole group it is still sung and played by individuals...  the individual tends to become submerged...  and even when the assessment of the major figures is made, the minor blues singer is forgotten.’

To listen to much of Dylan’s work  -  which at least between his break with ‘protest’ and his conversion to Christianity in every sense put a consistent emphasis on the importance of the individual rather than the mass  -  is to feel that Dylan has not forgotten the minor blues singer at all. He has listened to the minor figures wherever the somewhat random process of recording folk artists has allowed. We know it from listening to his work.

(Where Dylan heard what; the influence of ‘minor figures’ and unknown ones; the communal nature of much blues composition and how this gells with post-structuralist ideas of the unfixed text and the death of the author: all these are big questions, much discussed throughout this book. They are also central preoccupations of Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, Chapter 9, ‘Even Post-Structuralists Oughta Have The Pre-War Blues’.)

Dylan learnt and assimilated experience from the older songs and the older singers  -  singers who, in some cases, were ‘discovered’ or ‘re-discovered’ in the 1960s. Mississippi John Hurt is one example, the stylish and dapper Mance Lipscomb another.

Lipscomb was born 9 April, 1895, in Navasota, Texas  -  and eventually died there (on 30 January, 1976). He was ‘discovered’ in July 1960 by Mack McCormick and Chris Strachwitz and recorded  -  for the first time  -  a few weeks later in his two-room cabin, by which time he was in his sixties, though still with a strikingly youthful way of moving around in performance. He had almost a thousand songs he could perform.

Dylan met Lipscomb, and we can get an idea of the aura of the man, and thus a hint of the insights he could have given Dylan, from the description of him, and a transcribed conversational fragment, in Paul Oliver’s book. He was a ‘Texas sharecropper and songster with a reputation that extends widely in Grimes, Washington and Brazos counties...  A man of great dignity and natural culture...  a veritable storehouse of blues, ballads and songs of more than half a century... ’

This is Lipscomb talking (the spelling is as in Oliver’s transcript):

‘I been playin’ the git-tar now ’bout forty-nine years, and then I started out by myself, just heard it and learned it. Ear music...  My pa was a fiddler; he was an old perfessional fiddler. All my people can play some kind of music. Well, my daddy...  he played way back in olden days. You know, he played at breakdowns, waltzes, shottishes and all like that and music just come from me...  Papa were playing for dances out, for white folks and coloured. He played Missouri Waltz, Casey Jones, just anything you name he played it like I’m playin’ . He was just a self player until I was big enough to play behind him, then we played together...  ‘Sugar Babe’ was the first piece I learned, when I was a li’l boy about thirteen years old. Reason I know this so good, I got a whippin’ about it. Come out of the cotton-patch to get some water and I was up at the house playin’ the git-tar and my mother came in; whopped me n’cause I didn’t come back  -  I was playin’ the git-tar: “Sugar babe I’m tired of you, / Ain’t your honey but the way you do, / Sugar babe, it’s all over now...”’

            In Glen Alyn’s I Say Me For A Parable: The Oral Autobiography Of Mance Lipscomb, 1993, Lipscomb talks of encountering Dylan (and of Rambling Jack Elliott first hearing of Lipscomb when Dylan played him a Lipscomb record) but specifies no dates. Lipscomb says Dylan followed him to ‘Berkeley University’ and then ‘from Berkeley to the UCLA… And when I went off a duty he was settin round me, an hear what I was sayin, an pick up a lot of songs. He could imitate. But he wadna playin no gittah. Then. Takin you know, learnin from his head.’ On 18 May 1963, Dylan appeared on the same bill as Lipscomb at the first Monterey Folk Festival.

Lipscomb must have been an invaluable contact for Dylan  -  the one a black Texan with a personal repertoire stretching back to 1908 and incorporating songs a generation or two older than that, the other a white Minnesotan would-be artist of the whole American people born in 1941. Not only could Dylan have gained a knowledge ready to work for him but also, in a specific and personalised testimony, a feeling for the intimacy of connection of words and music in the expression of a spirit and a theme.

            Lipscomb’s repertoire included ‘Jack O’Diamonds Is A Hard Card To Play’ (he was field-recorded performing it in his home-town area the first time he ever recorded), which is a title-phrase picked up wholesale and retailed by Bob Dylan inside a piece of his own work that is not a blues. It is, in fact, from one of those poems he calls Some Other Kinds Of Songs . . ., published on the back sleeve of the album Another Side Of Bob Dylan. This long and generally inferior poem repeats several times, and then ends with,  ‘jack o’ diamonds / is a hard card t’ play.’

            Other songs Lipscomb recorded include ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, ‘You Gonna Quit Me’ (the Blind Blake song on Dylan’s Good As I Been To You, re-titled ‘You Ain’t Gonna Quit Me’ by Lipscomb), ‘Corrina Corrina’, ‘Mama, Let Me Lay It On You’, a song called ‘When Death Comes Creeping In Your Room’ - a title that strongly suggests it may prefigure Dylan’s ‘Watcha Gonna Do’  -  and ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’. In the section called ‘Playing For The White Folks’ in the Glen Alyn book, Lipscomb claims that Dylan took ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ from ‘his’ ‘Mama, Let Me Lay It On You’.

 [Mance Lipscomb: ‘Jack O’ Diamonds Is A Hard Card To Play’, Navasota TX, summer 1960; Mance Lipscomb Texas Sharecropper & Songster, Arhoolie LP 1001, El Cerrito, CA, 1960. ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’, nia.; Mance Lipscomb Vol. 4, Arhoolie LP 1033, El Cerrito CA, nia.]

WILFRID MELLERS: A BARELY PERSONAL MEMOIR

Wilfrid Mellers at 90; Downing College Cambridge  20 October 2004 (no photographer credit given)

The literary & music critic and composer and University of York music professor Wilfrid Mellers was born 100 years ago today (ie on April 26, 1914). I can’t claim to have known Mellers at York – I was an English & History student there in the mid-60s and he its founding Music Department Prof, and I doubt we ever spoke. I rarely attended music department events and really only knew of his interest in any “popular music” back then because I chatted a lot with one of his students, a whisky-drinking, fur-coat-wearing girl on whom I was more than somewhat keen, Carolyn Evans-Tipping (now dead). But I formed the strong impression that, classical composers aside, Mellers was exclusively interested in the Beatles, and especially excited by Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when it was new (while I was infinitely more engaged by Blonde On Blonde). Mellers gave no public indication of interest in Dylan’s work.

I knew from reading paperback collections of F.R. Leavis’ critical journal Scrutiny that Mellers had written literary criticism for it in the deep past (and I quoted him on Hemingway, I think, in my first book, Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, 1972, a book he later reviewed rather pallidly in the New Statesman), but when Leavis himself was a Visiting Professor on campus I never once saw the two men walking or talking together.

Then in the early 1970s Mellers was a talking head on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope (as I was, less frequently) and I remember we were once on the same programme, though I was being interviewed down the phone. He spoke about pop/rock as if melody were the important element (so I’d guess McCartney was his favourite Beatle) whereas I was arguing that in rock music melody was peripheral: that ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ hadn’t been important for melody but for sound, impact, sexiness, mystery, difference and feeling - elements far more central to the virtues of rock’n’roll and the blues.

That said, his 1980s book on Dylan and Dylan’s roots - A Darker Shade of Pale: a Backdrop to Bob Dylan - is a wonderful work, ahead of its time for its level of interest in hillbilly music and the like: an interest not so centred around or reliant upon the white part of the Harry Smith collection as that of American critics (then and now). It was a book that deserved to do far better than it did. It was published when Dylan enthusiasts generally paid scant heed to all these old geezers from Kentucky on whom Mellers was rightly so focussed. Most Dylan enthusiasm at the time was still posited on notions of his unique genius rather than on a receptivity to his work’s unfailing dialogue with older forms, musicians and songs.

Here is the entry I wrote on Mellers for 2006's Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (updated here to include his death), which includes a pulling together of more scattered mentions of him written earlier for Song & Dance Man III (1999):

Mellers, Wilfrid [1914 - 2008]

Wilfrid Howard Mellers was born in Leamington (pronounced Lemming-ton) Spa, in the English Midlands, on April 26, 1914. Educated at Cambridge, he fell under the rigorous influence of the pre-eminent and now deeply unfashionable literary critic F.R. Leavis, becoming a literary critic himself and writing for Leavis’ defiant journal Scrutiny before turning towards music, publishing his book Music and Society: England and the European Tradition in 1946 and becoming, by the mid-1960s, the new University of York’s first Professor of Music and a composer of distinction. He continued to straddle the rôles of critic and creative artist, and the genres of popular and classical music. His book Music in a New Found Land, written in the early 1960s and published in 1964, has held up creditably, and is remarkable for, among other things, its early (as it were) critical appraisal of Robert Johnson.

If it seemed an oblique comment when in 1967, in a news magazine survey titled ‘Sixties’, Mellers wrote that Blonde On Blonde was ‘concerned more with incantation than communication’, this may have been because at that point, like so many other musically sophisticated people, his interest in ‘pop’ was almost entirely taken up with an entrancement by the Beatles. He was among those who found the blandishments of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band more beguiling than Dylan’s work, and his book Twilight of the Gods was an early professorial rush into print with a Beatles study.

However, he never stopped paying attention to Dylan’s output, and he was extremely well informed as to many of its antecedents  -  and while in 1980 he could produce the detailed, part-Freudian, part-musicological study Bach and the Dance of God, and three years later Beethoven and the Voice of God, a year after that he could offer A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan. Awkardly titled, and more backdrop than Dylan, it has proved more and more interesting and relevant since its publication in 1984. When it was new, it was received without enthusiasm by many of us who still, as the 1980s dawned, preferred to insist upon the blazingly unerring individuality of Dylan’s art rather than concede that he stood in a tradition occupied by wrinkly old people with fiddles and banjos and obdurately conservative faces. In retrospect we can be grateful for, and a little impressed by, the sharp but serious attention Mellers’ book pays to the Carter Family, Nimrod Stoneman, Aunty Mollie Jackson, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmie Rodgers and others from among the souls who have haunted Dylan’s imagination and suffused his own art.

In 2004 the York Late Music Festival opened with a weekend’s tribute to Mellers, and that October (not April) a tribute concert was held at Downing College, Cambridge to mark Mellers’90th birthday. He died on 17 May 2008.

[Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society: England and the European Tradition, London:  Dennis Dobson, 1946; Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music, London: Stonehill, 1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); ‘Sixties’, New Statesman, London, 24 Feb 1967; Bach and the Dance of God, London: Faber & Faber, 1980; Beethoven and the Voice of God, London, Faber & Faber, 1983; A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan, London: Faber & Faber, 1984.]

 

BOB DYLAN & THE TITANIC: A RUMOUR

My sources suggest that the forthcoming Bob Dylan album may well include a song about the Titanic: a song that is about 14 minutes long. I know no more - and I can't really “know" even that much. But if it turns out to be true, it's surely a very rare example of his releasing something to tie in so handily with the centenary of a famous event.

Not that it would be Dylan's first allusion to this maritime disaster. As I wrote in Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, he first mentions the Titanic in ‘Desolation Row':

“The most striking evocation of impending catastrophe [in the song is] achieved very simply - in the one arresting line ‘The Titanic sails at dawn'. That summarises concisely the tone and colouring of the whole song."

Then there is Dylan's evocation of this same sense of foreboding in a rather later song. Quoting again from Song & Dance Man III:

“In 1981’s ‘Caribbean Wind’ (issued on Biograph, 1985)...the ‘Street band playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’' is not only an allusion to the meaning-loaded event of the sinking of the Titanic... but to the group of blues songs that arose to express it decades before Dylan first uses its symbolic clout himself in 1965’s ‘Desolation Row’: a group of songs which includes Hi Henry Brown’s ‘Titanic Blues’: ‘Titanic sinking in the deep blue sea / And the band all playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.' "

The footnote attached to that paragraph includes this: “The clutch of such songs reflected African-American delight at the sinking of the Titanic, because it signified whitey’s come-uppance, pride coming before a fall and so on. This feeling, however, was not restricted to black Americans. The Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok wrote: ‘The sinking of the Titanic has made me indescribably happy; there is, after all, an ocean.' "

Hi Henry recorded his song 20 years after the sinking of the ship. I'm interested to know, 80 years further on, whether Bob's forthcoming Titanic track (if it exists, and if it is forthcoming) will draw upon any of these old blues songs, perhaps interweaving some of their lines of blues lyric poetry into his own 2012 text.