Mance Lipscomb

Beau De Glen Lipscomb, known as Mance Lipscomb, was a Texas songster and sharecropper whose encyclopedic repertoire of blues, ballads, spirituals, dance tunes, rags, and folk songs made him one of the great cultural treasures discovered during the folk revival. He was not recorded until 1960, when he was 65 years old, but the recordings that followed (for Arhoolie, Reprise, and other labels) revealed a masterful fingerpicking guitarist with an enormous song collection spanning decades of rural Texas musical tradition. Unlike many blues artists, Lipscomb was a true songster in the older tradition, performing music for all occasions rather than specializing in blues alone. He performed at folk festivals throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.