Les Blank (U.S., 1971) New Print! During his first trip to the South, in 1960, Chris Strachwitz, a young aficionado of vernacular musics, recorded the remarkable Mance Lipscomb, a blues singer from Navasota, Texas. "Texas Sharecropper and Songster" became the first of many LPs from Arhoolie Records. The album itself can be seen in Les Blank's A Well-Spent Life (44 mins, Color, 16mm, From Flower Films), a soulful portrait of Lipscomb, who as an earthly wise 75-year-old looks back at the source of his blues, the hardtack times of a sharecropper, the weary recollections of a race-troubled South. Not resignation, but endurance comes out in Lipscomb's singing (and there's plenty of it). As far back as the 1930s, the Church of the Living God incorporated music, driven by the plaintive voice of the steel guitar, as a way to evoke the holy spirit. Filled with rousing performances, Robert L. Stone's Sacred Steel (58 mins, Color, BetaSP, From Arhoolie) traces the evolution of the electric steel as it has been passed through four generations of church musicians. Consummate steel players such as the Campbell Brothers and Willie Eason talk about how the congregation rides high upon their buoyant phrasings, sliding toward the spirit on strings of steel.-Steve Seid