Plumbing the Depths
Local spoken-word artist Minton Sparks explores the darker recesses of women’s experiences
by Janice Johnson
Minton Sparks
This Dress (Rural Records)
Appearing Feb. 28 at Darkhorse Theater
Minton Sparks is a poet for the people, not the academy. “People always say, ’I hate poetry, but I like to listen to this,’” she says, referring to her spoken-word recordings, the second of which, This Dress, came out this week. Quoted on the disc’s back cover, author Dorothy Allison claims that if Sparks “ain’t related to me, she should be.”
A longtime Nashville resident, Sparks can more than hold her own as a poet and a performer, as she proved last year at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, where she shared an audience with iconoclast Karen Finley. In her onstage getup, Sparks resembles Minnie Pearl, whose photograph she keeps tucked away in her pocketbook prop. (”For good luck, even though I’m dark and she wasn’t.”) Sparks evokes Pearl in conversation as well, interspersing nuggets of sisterly wisdom in among answers to the preciously intrusive outcries of her offspring.
It is with this tender and funny attention to detail that Sparks hits the boards Friday at Darkhorse Theater. She’ll be celebrating the release, on her Rural Records label, of This Dress, on which she performs a dozen original poems and prose pieces accompanied, at various times, by Maura O’Connell, Keb’ Mo’, fiddler Tammy Rogers, keyboardist Steve Conn and guitarist Rob Jackson. (Conn and Jackson will appear with Sparks at the Darkhorse.)
The album’s predecessor, Middlin’ Sisters (2000), explored Sparks’ maternal lineage—and particularly, her grandmother’s generation. Picking up where that record left off, This Dress moves forward in time, shifting the focus to Sparks’ mother as a young woman, and to Sparks herself as a girl. While not entirely autobiographical, each poem rings with authenticity; each is based on historical events and expresses what Sparks calls her “voice of truth,” the musical mother tongue of unself-conscious Southern vernacular. Sparks attended radio and television school, where she was taught to lose her drawl, only to find it in her poetry—its elongated diphthongs, worn-down word endings and telltale vernacular (”cat-head biscuits”).
The music on Sparks’ new album likewise mirrors her characters’ voices, updating the spare, folksy acoustics of Middlin’ Sisters with a more modern, almost cosmopolitan sound. Where the stories on Middlin’ Sisters were accompanied by hand-held instruments that sound most at home on a porch or in the yard, here Conn’s piano and pump organ bring the music indoors. Not only does this serve to underscore the changing landscape of daily life from one generation to another, it reflects the more internalized nature of Sparks’ latest clutch of stories.
Drawn to the darker, more bittersweet parts of women’s lives, Sparks finds the profound in the everyday, unearthing meaning in petty details such as the contents of her grandmother’s going-to-church purse, a collection of items she always has onstage. There’s nothing “Aw, shucks” about Sparks’ versifying. Without pretense, her sweet-sounding yarns illuminate how difficult—and necessary—it is to leave the known: our mothers’ homes, our abusive husbands, our girlhood innocence, our collective dependence on the seductive pull of both sexuality and salvation. Witness, for example, the wrenching “When You Coming Home, Girl?,” about Sparks’ mother leaving home for college and then leaving college for a man.
“The through-line is, for me, the power of sorrow,” Sparks says of her work, which is delightfully free of highbrow ideology or feminist theory. “In every piece, I see each of the women having on a similar kind of housedress, some old ugly dress, that could talk if it wasn’t on her. Sorrow knows it. It’s not weak in any way. That sorrow sort of binds up their wounds and carries them through to a place that goes somewhere else that [isn’t] really known by the end of the record.”
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