{"id":3856,"date":"2018-07-14T02:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-07-14T06:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=3856"},"modified":"2018-07-19T04:33:43","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T08:33:43","slug":"so-different-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/so-different-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"So Different Blues (Mance Lipscomb)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"So Different Blues\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fsb3wAqva2Y?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I always liked Mance Lipscomb\u2019s music, but as a kid I was first struck by his versions of old pop standards. He had a gentle, swinging style that worked perfectly with that material, and I\u00a0 quickly learned his versions of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/shine-harvest-moon\/\">Shine On, Harvest Moon<\/a>\u201d and \u201cAlabama Jubilee.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3879 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Mance-Lipscomb.jpg?resize=258%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"258\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Mance-Lipscomb.jpg?resize=258%2C300&amp;ssl=1 258w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Mance-Lipscomb.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 258px) 100vw, 258px\" \/>I paid less attention to his blues, which seemed to me less distinctive \u2013 though a couple worked their way into my repertoire: I picked up roughly his version of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bout-a-spoonful\/\">Bout a Spoonful<\/a>\u201d from Dave Van Ronk, without knowing Lipscomb was the source, and a Belgian friend turned me on to \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/aint-you-sorry\/\">Ain\u2019t You Sorry<\/a>,\u201d which gave me a new appreciation of his guitar work. But I never really understood how good he was until a year or two after I got back from Africa, when <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bibi-theresa\/\">Dominic Kakolobango<\/a>, whom I\u2019d stayed with in Lubumbashi, came to visit the US.<\/p>\n<p>When I met Dominic he was playing the classic Shaba acoustic style of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/masanga\/\">Jean-Bosco Mwenda<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lwa-kiyeke\/\">Edouard Masengo<\/a>, some American country and western, and a lot of French <em>chanson<\/em> \u2013 he introduced me to the music of Georges Brassens, who has been a passion of mine ever since. In turn, I introduced him to acoustic blues, and when he came to visit we listened to a lot of records and he spent hours and days taping his favorites.<\/p>\n<p>Dominic\u2019s tastes ranged widely, but out of all my records, the artists who most caught his attention were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/richlands-woman\/\">Mississippi John Hurt<\/a> and Mance Lipscomb. That made sense, of course \u2013 I&#8217;d always associated the Congolese acoustic style with the gentle swing of Hurt&#8217;s playing. But until Dominic became fascinated with Lipscomb&#8217;s recordings, I\u2019d never put him in the same class with Hurt, who I sometimes name as my favorite musician ever. Dominic, by contrast, loved them equally and maybe even marginally favored Lipscomb, and since I trusted his taste, I listened along with him, and after he left I kept listening.<\/p>\n<p>The more I listened, the more I was struck not only by the music but by Lipscomb\u2019s incredibly deft lyrical sense. Much of his repertoire was made up of blues standards, and I had tended to think of them as lyrically generic, but when I paid attention it was obvious they were anything but. The older blues singers \u2013 even the greatest ones \u2013 came up playing for dances and on the street, where audiences were not typically sitting quietly or demanding a cohesive lyrical narrative, so although the poetry of individual blues verses is often brilliant and striking, full songs were generally compilations of fairly random verses, connected by emotional feel or just as one verse reminded a singer of another.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3880\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Mance-Lipscomb2.jpg?resize=300%2C202&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" \/>Lipscomb was an exception, because he mostly sang unified songs &#8212; they might vary from one day to the next, but they held together as cohesive lyrical compositions. The most distinctive included some murder ballads in blues form, such as \u201cElla Speed\u201d and \u201cFreddie,\u201d which as far as I know were his own compositions. But even his more generic blues tended to flow from verse to verse in logical progressions, and the verses were strikingly well chosen and often phrased in novel and interesting ways.<\/p>\n<p>All of which is to say I began to appreciate Lipscomb as one of the great blues songwriters \u2013 and that naturally took me to this song, which is one of his masterpieces. It is aptly named, at least from a chordal point of view &#8212; lyrical form is a fairly straightforward twelve-bar blues, but the chords are unlike anything I know in that form or any other.<\/p>\n<p>As for the lyric, I gradually realized that this is another murder ballad, but so subtle that it\u2019s easy to miss the denouement \u2013 indeed, it&#8217;s handled so subtly that some people will probably disagree with that description. In any case, it\u2019s a great song and Lipscomb recorded it several times, somewhat varying the verses but keeping the theme intact. I\u2019m not sure my version precisely matches any one of his, but it\u2019s one of my all-time favorites.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Dominic picked up Lipscomb\u2019s version of an old ragtime-blues standard, \u201cTake Me Back,\u201d wrote some additional verses in Swahili, and that\u2019s another of my all-time favorites, especially in this version, backed by a band back in the Republic of Congo:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"take me back,dominic kakolobango\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DQkoWi4W-0s?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; I always liked Mance Lipscomb\u2019s music, but as a kid I was first struck by his versions of old pop standards. He had a gentle, swinging style that worked perfectly with that material, and I\u00a0 quickly learned his versions of \u201cShine On, Harvest Moon\u201d and \u201cAlabama Jubilee.\u201d I paid less attention to his blues, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/so-different-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">So Different Blues (Mance Lipscomb)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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In\u00a0Sweet Man, a racial protest novel from 1930, Gilmore Millen named it along with \"Pallet on the Floor,\" \"Stavin' Chain,\" and \"The Dozens\" as \u201cforerunners of the blues, at\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"sweet man","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/sweet-man-194x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1511,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/shine-harvest\/","url_meta":{"origin":3856,"position":1},"title":"Shine On, Harvest Moon (Mance Lipscomb)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 24, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Thanks to my father, I grew up on pop songs of the teens and 1920s, but I don't know if I would have performed any in public if I hadn't heard Mance Lipscomb. I was coming from a background of Woody Guthrie, followed by old blues, and although the Kweskin\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/mance-lipscomb-lp-1-295x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3429,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/aint-you-sorry\/","url_meta":{"origin":3856,"position":2},"title":"Ain&#8217;t You Sorry (Mance Lipscomb)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 10, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a favorite from Mance Lipscomb which I learned in Antwerp after that winter fronting a trio in Sevilla. Within the first week or so of getting back to Belgium I got together with a very nice woman named Miet and over the next month or so gradually moved\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Mance-Lipscomb-4-295x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5104,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/ella-speed\/","url_meta":{"origin":3856,"position":3},"title":"Ella Speed (A New Orleans murder ballad)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 6, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0 This is a new one in my repertoire, worked up in the course of researching my book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories. I had heard other versions of the song from Lead Belly, who recorded it several times, and Mance Lipscomb, and the Kweskin Jug Band,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Jellycover-e1710359243890.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4481,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/coffee-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":3856,"position":4},"title":"Coffee Blues (Mississippi John Hurt)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 6, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Mississippi John Hurt always explained that this song was about coffee; specifically Maxwell House, because it was \"good to the last drop, just like it says on the can.\" He'd say just one spoonful of Maxwell House coffee was as good as two or three cups of any other brand.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Maxwell-House-can.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1753,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/columbus-stockade-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":3856,"position":5},"title":"Columbus Stockade (Woody and Cisco)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the pleasures of playing on the street with Rob was that I had a second voice on the choruses of my favorite Woody Guthrie - Cisco Houston duets. I'd spent the previous couple of years learning blues and other stuff that lent itself to fingerstyle guitar,\u00a0 but I\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/woody-and-cisco-300x270.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3856"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3888,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3856\/revisions\/3888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}