"Well, Mark was young and white and - I bet - spent a lot more time perfecting his art than Mance.
To my ears, every element of Mark's version is better than Mance's.
We can admire these old "authentic" performers, but don't try to tell me Mance was great in any way. He was interesting in that he gave us an insight in to a certain musical past, but Mance, himself, wasn't a great artist."

How much Mance Lipscomb have you heard? While, if I had to choose, I'd plump for Mississippi John Hurt in terms of 'great artist' status, fortunately I don't have to, and I would say Lipscomb was indeed a great artist (even though he'd have rejected the term himself, preferring "songster", as Dick points out). If we define a great artist as someone who makes great art, then Mance Lipscomb was a great artist.

Even if we just compare Spoelstra's Sugar Babe to Lipscomb's, the most glaringly obvious difference is one of timbre: Mance Lipscomb's voice sounds huge: he has a saturated, thick voice. I'd pay money for an album of Mance Lipscomb just talking; I can't say that about Spoelstra's voice. Which is OK: he can sing well, but it's not an idiosyncratic voice.

Can't remember the name of the poet, but I once read a poem that described Bob Dylan as having "a voice like wet fur". While I'm not sure that it really applies to Dylan's voice,it's a beautiful phrase, and whenever I hear a singer like Lipscomb, that's what I think of. Mance Lipscomb's tone is up there with the most sensual of blues singers (or 'songsters'): Pink Anderson, Archie Edwards, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten.

The tone of Lipscomb's guitar is also vastly superior to Spoelstra's. It just has that beaten up blues sound. It sounds defeated but resilient. Everything about Lipscomb's recordings sounds magnified and close-up, which you might put down to the recording engineer's mike placement, until you listen to more and more albums and realise he ALWAYS sounds like that.

Technically, sure, Spoelstra sounds like a more consistent guitarist. But his guitar doesn't have the same bounce as Lipscomb by a long way - in comparison it sounds pretty hidebound - and he has none of Mance's tone.