I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman

Rating:
Summary: Difficult to read, but definitely worthwhile.
Review: No doubt Glen Alyn has done a lot of hard work putting this book together, but you do get the feeling this is not the best work on Mance Lipscomb imaginable. Lipscomb is a highly skilled story-teller and doesn't need the author's phonetic transcribtions to come across. If Alyn really wanted us to know about Mance's particular dialect, he should have had the book accompanied by a tape instead. Having said that, however, the book is still very entertaining, and at the end of the book we actually do have quite a clear understanding of Mance Lipscomb and the world he lived in

Rating:
Summary: More than the blues
Review: This is a book that has stayed with me long after I read it. Mance has a way of speaking very directly and has a storytellers flare for keeping his narratives interesting. I picked it up as a book on the blues but I remember it as a rare frank and fascinating conversation with a man from a very different social, political and racial reality. Seeing Les Blank's documentary "A Well Spent Life" will give you Mance's voice and enable you to read the dialect with ease. It makes me wish that someone would release a CD of Mance telling stories. Glen Alyn deserves credit for his courage to transcribe the dialect and for offering just the right amount of commentary before stepping aside.