A Well Spent Life

Texas sharecropper Mance Lipscomb began singing and playing guitar at an early age but was largely unknown until he was discovered by Mack McCormick and Chris Strachwitz at the age of 65. They recorded his first album, Texas Songster in 1960, and his performances of songs like "Sugar Babe" and "Shine on Harvest Moon" made him an international sensation, hailed as the greatest blues guitarist and singer of all time. In 1972, Les Blank, the poet laureate of the music documentary, moved into Lipscomb's world to capture a sense of who he was. As with his other musical documentaries -- including The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins (1970) and In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984) -- Blank is interested in more than just capturing the music. He captures the whole man within a cultural context that relates the blues to Lipscomb's family life and the Texas rural world in which he continued to live, even after becoming a major blues star. The result is a portrait of one man's adaptation to hard times, revealing what it did to his character and how it is reflected in his music.

By Frank Miller