the real thing

The more I listen to this guy, the more I find I can't get enough of him.

Mance Lipscomb was born in east Texas to a former slave from Alabama and a half-Choctaw mother in 1895, and neither the harsh realities of sharecropping nor the threat of white terrorism were strangers to his formative years.

He played and sang from the time he was 11, and in his youth was acquainted with recording star Blind Lemon Jefferson and the gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson. He also apparently had opportunities to play and tour with the white Oklahoman and "blue yodeler" Jimmie Rodgers, but passed on the chance and never recorded or gained any notoriety beyond Navasota, his birthplace and hometown, until he was "discovered" in 1960.

At his first big concert, playing for an audience of 40 thousand at a folk festival in Berkeley in 1961, his version of the traditional lament, "Motherless Children" left the audience so stunned that he couldn't gauge their reaction, and thinking that maybe he'd done something wrong, ended his set after just three numbers.

Motherless children have a hard time when their mother is dead.
They don't have any place to go;
Wandering around from door to door...

In the 13 years that were left to him Lipscomb recorded fairly prolifically, and his pleasant voice, prodigious fingerpicking style, and amazingly wide-ranging repertoire (he called himself "a songster," not a "blues singer") are well documented. He also left an oral autobiography whose transcriber unfortunately felt it necessary to phonetically reproduce Lipscomb's east Texas patois, but it's still worth the read.

If you're curious enough to want a taste right now, check out this incredible YouTube video (from a '60's documentary) of Mance tearing up "Jack of Diamonds" (mistitled at the site). This is atypical, as he didn't play slide very often, but here, with a jackknife in his left hand and a broken finger on his right, he demonstrates that he could make a guitar do anything he wanted it to, in any style he chose.