Mance Lipscomb The Lost Tapes 1965

One evening in 1965 my friend Marc Silber brought Mance Lipscomb whom he had known for years to my home on Manhattan's West 86th Street for dinner and to record a few tunes. Marc had brought along his Gibson 1937 Advanced Jumbo which Mance played for us and reminisced while I recorded him on my Bell reel-to-reel tape recorder. These 15 tracks are the result of that evening's recording session.
Dick Abrams
Chicago, 2023
00:00 So Different Blues
05:35 Shine On Harvest Moon
07:30 Gotta See Your Mama
11:50 Goin Down Slow
15:40 Baby Please Don't Go
21:05 Stop Time
22:50 Shorty George
25:40 Tell Me, Baby
28:30 I Ain't Got Nobody
30:05 Shake Me, Mama
34:00 It's All Over Now
36:50 Darktown Strutter's Ball
39:00 Night Time is the Right Time
43:50 Nobody's Business
47:00 Ain't It Hard
MARC SILBER'S PERSONAL RECOLLECTION OF THE SESSION:
Soon after I first came to Berkeley in the Summer of 1961 and was learning folk music I discovered Jon and Deirdre Lundberg's Fretted Instrument shop on Dwight Way. This was a daily hang-out for folkies and instrument lovers.
One day a man came in and said he had started a record company and asked Jon if he would sell the first album he produced. That was Chris Strachwicz and he had discovered Mance Lipscomb on a trip to Texas.
Soon Mance came to the Bay Area and we got to meet him and hear him make music and he was the nicest person and also a very deep person. Mance would appear at Folk Music venues and Folk Festivals and he eventually came to New York City where in November, 1963, I had opened a small Instrument shop in Greenwich Village in the style of Lundberg's, called Fretted Instruments. Mance would hang out there when he came to New York and it was a great blessing for all of us.
On one of these visits I took him to the home of someone immersed in blues and old-timey music and who collected vintage instruments, and that was Richard Abrams. Richard made a recording of Mance one evening on a reel to reel tape recorder. These recordings have now resurfaced as RIchard is making them available to the Public. This is a blessing and falls into a category I call RESCUED MUSIC.
I could tell many stories of my time hanging out with Mance Lipscomb and how he was always gentle, positive, very natural, and deep.
Eventually, a film-maker associated with Chris Strachwicz made a 44 min. documentary about Mance called "A Well-Spent Life" (Les Blank, Flower Films, 1971).
I will close with something that was quoted from Mance by a writer who asked him if Mance was his born name. Mance said no, my born name cause trouble where I lived so we did not use it. And what was that name asked this writer? EMANCIPATION LIPSCOMB.
1965 1/4" audio tape was digitized, edited, illustrated, and mastered by S.E Winters (wallpapermusique)

[@mic982]

Very precious recordings thanks to Dick Abrams & Marc Silver. A National treasure.

[@jamesderoc6717]

really good quality

[@nev8109]

❤

[@hannesvolk3446]

Thank you for taking the effort of sharing these recordings. This electrifying rendition of Nobody's Business already would have been worth the upload on its own. It is always a pleasure, to stumble over previously unreleased recordings of Mance Lipscomb. I wonder, how many recordings of unreleased songs are still out there. It seems to me, that his repertoire got a bit narrower towards the end and many sets share the same numbers (probably the most popular by audience choice). Judging by the occasionally appearing rarer recordings I believe his repertoire was much bigger than the released recordings suggest.

[@RCMontgomery]

Thank you for posting; this is simply amazing! Mance knocked it out of the park on every song (as he tended to do), and he sounded great on that Gibson, too. I've been seeking out all the recordings of Mance that I can find, and, as far as I'm aware, this may be the only recording of Mance playing "Nobody's Business" (though his "Cocaine Done Killed My Baby" is a variant, he played it here with entirely different words and melody), so it's truly a historic recording.

[@mic982]

Oh, btw, go listen to Led Zeppelin's recording of 'Nobody's Fault but Mine' and then have a listen again to Mance's last song on this recording. Then you'll see for yourself how LZ "borrowed" from Mance and other Black musicians to become the Rock legends they are. Music builds on music - artists bulid on one another, whether or not they want to acknowledge it.