Mance Lipscomb – Trouble In Mind

The recordings of this charming and versatile Texas singer are among the most credible samplings of the real song bags of 20th-century rural and small-town “songsters.” In a sense, there was no such thing as “blues singers” — just performers who sang blues in their mix and were pressed by commercial trends to limit themselves to that form and style.

This reissue is taken from clean professional sessions cut at Lipscomb’s Navasota, Texas, home by producer Chris Strachwitz and researcher Mac McCormick in 1960. Many of those sides became the basis of the first LPs from the Arhoolie label; these long-lost recordings first appeared on — of all places — the big-time Reprise label of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack.

Trouble In Mind extends the cuts included from the Reprise album’s original 12 to 25, and offers an engaging cross-section of Tin Pan Alley tunes (“Shine On Harvest Moon”, “Alabama Bound”), danceable rhythm songs and instrumentals, syncopated ballads (“Casey Jones”), hokum rags (“You Gonna Look Like A Monkey When You Get Old”), and even a few blues, whether folk or, as the title track, more jazz-oriented.

Lipscomb’s picked, rhythmic style and grab-bag repertoire had a profound influence on pop artists. Jimmie Rodgers — with a similarly mixed bag of pop music that history has deemed “country,” apparently asked Lipscomb to join him on the road as early as 1922 — but Mance chose to stay home, played in local dance joints, and went unrecorded until these lively sessions almost 40 years later.

This album marketed him as an “American Folk Song Traditionalist”; coffeehouse folksingers were copping his change-up acoustic numbers from the moment these cuts were released. Numbers here (from the record, or held back till now but heard in live shows of the time) were adapted by Bob Dylan (“Rocks And Gravel”) and Texas singer-songwriters from Townes Van Zandt to Lyle Lovett. His version of “Take A Whiff”, as much as Lead Belly’s, lay behind the Byrds’ rock interpretation, and Eric Clapton sources can be spotted in “Lawdy Mama” and “Motherless Children”.

The key reason to grab this one is not as a precursor to anything but simply for the pleasurable experience those followers found here. The blues and folk revivals brought him to large audiences and led to a good many recording sessions before his death in 1976, but these initial recordings are an important part of his story.