Imagine working the land from dawn to dusk for more than 50 years, unknown to the wider world, and then, in your mid-60s, standing on a California stage sharing a bill with Bob Dylan. That is the true story of Beau De Glen Lipscomb, born April 9, 1895, near Navasota, Texas, to a father who had been born into slavery in Alabama and a mother of African-American and Native American heritage. As a youth he renamed himself Mance, short for emancipation. After his father left, he quit school in the third grade to work the fields beside his mother, and he spent most of his life inside the rigged debt cycle of Texas tenant farming.

Music gave him a life the fields could not. Self-taught on a guitar his mother bought him, and shaped by playing with a blind musician named Sam Rogers in Brenham, he developed a dead-thumb finger-picking style that let  ...