A friend who knows I'm writing a profile of Minton Sparks practically grabs my lapels. We're standing outside the Darkhorse Theater, just let out from the opening night performance of Sparks' Sin Sick tour. He's giddy, mad, overcome. He wants to explain what he's seen but can't find the words. He's almost shaking. "I mean, that was...that was.... I don't know what that was. But that was something."
I wonder if perhaps my friend does not get out enough.
Still, he has a point. What have I just witnessed for the past hour in the packed Darkhorse? Poetry? Performance art? Was it a concert?
There were words, to be sure: 17 stories, with themes ranging from gossip to sin to death. But in the telling there was also acting, some preaching, a little buck dancing. John Jackson sat on a chair, stage left, with six guitars. Steve Conn, stage right, played his keyboard in a minor key, the key of mourning. From the crowd there were great whoops of laughter and moans of recognition and, a few times, stunned silence.
And there was, of course, the woman at the front of the stage, the reason the whole sold-out lot of us were there, strikingly long-limbed, sultry-voiced and dirty blond, not a grain of makeup and decked out this summer evening in her grandmother's plain black dress and a pair of white patent leathers, slightly scuffed. Off-white hose. The purplish stole around her neck—she discarded it five minutes into her...what, exactly? Act? Set? Recital? What did Minton Sparks do up there on that stage?
The friend who almost grabbed my lapels is a teacher and a writer, a literate sort. Still, he can't find the words. "That was...something," he says again.
The term performance artist, while technically correct, hardly does Sparks justice. She does not stick knives into her eye sockets or dip herself in chocolate. But calling her simply a poet, an actress or a musician is equally unjust. The fact is, Sparks defies genre, incorporating what she needs of all these arts into her performance at any given moment. She has been favorably but mistakenly compared to Minnie Pearl. While these performers share a sense of fashion and a rural Tennessee heritage, Pearl's repertoire, which featured gentle satires of the folks back home, pales beside Sparks' explosive narrative of Southern madness, grief, lust, love and survival. Sparks, onstage, lives her stories, alternating between narrator and participant. Watching her perform this trick is spellbinding. She is a storyteller one moment, her Aunt Evie the next. But what is most shocking, and what invites the comparisons to Pearl, is how funny Sparks is. She dances, she tells topical jokes, she makes funny faces. In fact, the most bizarre aspect of a Sparks performance is how often—and how much—an audience laughs as she enacts her Gothic yarns.
Raised in Rutherford County, Minton Sparks is the stage and recording name of Jill Webb-Hill, a 42-year-old Nashville writer and performer. A week before her Darkhorse performance, she agrees to meet me at a coffeehouse to discuss her work. Sparks is strikingly tall, so that when she leans back in her chair, which she frequently does, she seems far away, and when she leans in to make a point, spreading her long fingers across the black metal table, she seems very close. In those animated, up-close moments, Sparks' already large eyes widen and she'll pull her longish blond hair back behind her ears. Made up, she could pass for a fashion model. Undecorated, she appears to be what she is in her non-performing life: a professional woman, a mother, a wife at the end of a long day. When I ask about this duality, the typical suburban woman on the one hand, explosive performer on the other, she laughs. "Well," she says, "it is sort of soccer mom by day, club crawler by night." About her stage name, she explains she took it simply to honor her mother's people. "My maternal grandparents' side of the family are all either Mintons or Sparkses. So much of my work comes out of this motherline, it doesn't even feel like a pseudonym."
As a child, Sparks spent summers in Daytona Beach, Fla., working in her father's various businesses. "My father was one of the great all-time entrepreneurs," she says. The most interesting of his ventures was the Marco Polo Theme Park, where Sparks and her siblings ran the rides. "I also dressed up in a Yogi Bear costume to throw gum out the back of a pickup truck."
She went on to play point guard on the women's basketball team at Sewanee, where she majored in psychology, then headed for New York to intern for Good Morning America. Returning to Nashville, she quickly landed a job doing promotions for WSM Radio. She also wrote a syndicated radio show for The Nashville Network Radio, as well as segments for Crook and Chase. While still at WSM, Sparks enrolled in graduate school, earning a master's degree in counseling from Vanderbilt. Then it was on to Vanderbilt's divinity school. She dropped out, however, when she discovered she didn't want to be the minister of a church.
During all this—WSM, graduate school, spirituality—Sparks married John Hill, a Nashville businessman, and had a son, now 14, and daughter, 9. Eventually, after stints with a number of Nashville nonprofits, she became an adjunct professor of psychology at Tennessee State University, where she still teaches. In 1999, she embarked on her current venture. "I found my life's work at the end of about 2 million jobs," she says.
It started with a "Swim With Words" poetry workshop taught in Nashville by the renowned poet Kelly Falzone. "We connected immediately," says Falzone. "We both had young children and were trying to live the writing life in the midst of that domesticity."
Along with playwright and singer/songwriter Marcus Hummon, who would go on to produce Sparks' first record, they launched a writer's group, meeting regularly to review each other's new work. The three quickly added poet Kevin Nance and poet and Tennessean religion writer Ray Waddle. Meeting on Thursday nights, the group dubbed themselves The Thirsty Night Poets—"we did a little drinking," says Falzone—meeting regularly for three years before disbanding when various members moved away or took on different projects. But Falzone and Sparks remained close. "For Minton, poetry is in the marrow of her bones," Falzone says. "It's pumping through her all the time. Just being around the house, sitting around the kitchen table or going to the Y, she's talking in poetry."
Sparks began incorporating music into her poems not long into her sessions with The Thirsty Poets. She'd been writing poetry since graduate school but felt frustrated that the only outlet for her work was in obscure and little-read journals. "I mean, I love the Clackamas Review, but how many people have even heard of it?" she says, laughing. Determined to reach a larger audience, Sparks took up Hummon's offer to read her work at one of his shows at Douglas Corner Cafe. Around the same time, her guitar teacher, Rob Jackson, invited her to his studio to record a demo. Sparks would speak her poems, and Jackson would play behind her. "It started out in my mind as an accompanist relationship," Sparks says. "But it turned quickly into musical conversations with the poems. Jackson, she says, "truly got underneath what I was trying to say with the music." Instead of merely strumming in the background, he began composing formal pieces for specific poems. Over time, the duo recorded six tracks for the initial demo. They played it for Hummon, who signed on immediately to produce an entire album.
While poets have certainly recorded with musicians before, there's a notable difference between those recordings and what Sparks is doing: Steve Conn, who produced Sparks' second album and plays piano on many of her tracks, says, "It's not like the beat poets, or other performance poetry where the poet's accompanied by an upright bass, or whatever, and they're each doing their own thing." Adds Sparks, "When I was in New York, I heard Winton Marsalis playing behind some poets and it was like a jazz fusion thing. And, you know, even Anne Sexton had a band. I like all that, but it's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to have a conversation. I saw what could happen when a musician could hear the tenor of the poem, the music behind the poem on its own merits."
"To me it's like writing a soundtrack to a movie," says Conn. "I have a framework with a basic idea, a composition with themes here and there. And then she'll change the way she reads it according to the way I play it. Then I change the way I play it according to the way she reads it. When it works, it's a beautiful thing. It's collaboration. We're creating something lasting."
As that first demo made the rounds, more and more musicians got excited by it. They saw themselves as helping to create an entirely new genre. Soon, Darrell Scott signed up to play strings on the fledgling record, and Waylon Jennings, one of Sparks' longtime heroes, contributed an a cappella version of "Precious Memories." The end result, in 2001, was the poet's debut album, Middlin' Sisters, an astonishingly powerful 12-poem paean to Sparks' matrilineal heritage. The collection is a series of gorgeously told narrative portraits. At the top of the matriarchal tree is the great-grandmother, Grace, who stands separate and above the "whooping and hollering" of the kin who come after. Grace is a kind of ethereal presence over a magnificently dysfunctional Southern clan held together by hardscrabble women. There is Thelma, a hard drinker and river barge worker, the first to be issued a DUI on the Mississippi; Trella, blind in one eye, who takes up arms against her husband; Lottie, married seven times and dead a pauper; and the ultra-feared and respected Me-maw, who'd line up the grandchildren beside her yellow school bus to willow-whip sense into them.
"I wrote it for my kids," Sparks says. "It's all about the generation of my grandparents and great-aunts. It's written so my kids would know these people. The vanilla's coming in now, and it's the dying of the colors. I think that generation was the last dying breed. They were so individualistic. And then watching my kids grow up in Green Hills, I wanted them to know that, yes, we may look boring now, but you come from some wild people."
After Sparks mailed her an unsolicited copy of Middlin' Sisters, the great fiction writer Dorothy Allison, whose Bastard Out of Carolina is one of the finest pieces of Southern prose in two decades, wrote this about Sparks: "If I could have heard poetry like this as a girl, I wouldn't have had to waste all those years thinking we were dumb as dirt. Minton Sparks sounds like my mama, and my aunt Dot, and my aunt Grace and even a bit like my uncle Jack—only better and wilder and heartbreakingly more powerful."
Most of the poems on Middlin' Sisters are told from the point of view of a young female narrator, presumably Sparks herself, watching, commenting on and sometimes participating in these older women's wildness, which Sparks, to her everlasting credit as a poet, renders not as gratuitously aberrant, but as necessary, even inevitable. In "Trella's Trash," for example, the narrator's great-aunt Trella has been beaten for years by her husband and made to cover the windows of their ratty house with Reynolds Wrap "to keep out the light." At 91, after 65 years of marriage, Trella leaves her man, even as her relatives, with their "pork-rind fingers," scold her for it behind her back. This is how the poem ends:
Ten years back she'd fired a shot
at Frank's Ford window.
Gravel was flying,
insulting the bruises
already staining her cheeks.
That rifle kicked.
She sang "Amazing Grace"
into the smoke she casually blew
off the barrel of the gun.
She'd won,
for a minute.
Late that night, he was rattling the door.
"You want some more, Trella?
You want some more?"
"Sure I do, Frank.
Always did."
By the time Middlin' Sisters was released, Sparks had already written most of the material for a second album. She'd also developed a stage show featuring performances of her poems. It began when Sparks' brother, actor/playwright Greg Webb, found himself with an open slot in his one-man show, "Sermons From the Road," and invited Sparks to perform some poems as a character with the voice of her narrator. "I said 'no' at first, and then something prompted me to call him back and say 'yes,' " Sparks recalls. "That saying 'yes' to something I had no idea how to do was how the Minton Sparks stage show was born."
Later, having honed her act at local clubs like The Sutler, Bluebird Café and upstairs at Bongo Java, Sparks took her show on the road. As bookings picked up, the guitarist John Jackson, who'd just finished 10 years of touring with Bob Dylan and then Lucinda Williams, replaced Rob Jackson as her principal live collaborator, and he and Sparks began performing shows across the country. They played university English departments, coffeehouses, clubs, theaters and even opened for Ben Folds at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan. While the crowd at a Ben Folds show is not exactly like that at, say, Ozzfest, still Sparks had her fears about performing in front of a rock 'n' roll audience. "I was thinking, uh-oh. It was this young crowd, and they were Ben Folds freaks." She went onto the stage fearing the worst. "They were like dogs when they're not quite sure what they're looking at," she remembers. But once she got on the with her performance, she says, "They took to it like crazy."
While the live performances continued to bring down house after house, it wasn't until the reviews came in for Sparks' second album, This Dress, in 2002, that a more general public became aware of her work. On this disc, Irish balladeer Maura O'Connell lends her voice to two poems, bluesman Keb' Mo' helps out with a playful slide guitar on another, and on the record's most stomping piece, "Dance Caller at the Marco Polo Park," fiddle prodigy Tammy Rogers re-creates the atmosphere of a no-holds-barred square dance competition. This Dress earned spoken-word album of the year at the Just Plain Folk Music Awards, and a cut from the record, "Her Purse," placed as one of the top five songs of the year in the Chicago Sun Times' Off the Beaten Path Records review.
Major publications raved about her. Brian Mansfield, in USA Today, described Sparks' artistry as "telling tales of a rural Southern past connected to the present by the thick molasses-like strands of her drawl," and Frank Goodman, writing in Puremusic.com, expressed what everybody who had heard the records or seen her perform was thinking: "You're gonna see this hillbilly poet on TV, mark my words. She's gonna be famous. She's the real McCoy."
If Middlin' Sisters hones in on the personalities from Sparks' grandparents' era, This Dress jumps the focus to her parents' generation. The narrator also becomes more integral to the stories, and the stories themselves become more complex. In "Fill Her Up," a mother pumps gas to put her daughter through school; in a very funny aside in an otherwise quietly seething poem, the mother's name is "Ethel, cross-stitched on the station shirt / like she's become one / of the ingredients in the gas she pumps." In "Bird in a Cage," Aunt Evie comes to learn the "foreign war" that would forever cage her husband has caged her, too. And in a wonderful scene from "Ambulance Chasers," the young narrator readies herself for a sleepover by packing the three items most necessary to any girl leaving home for the night: a hairbrush, clean panties and a deck of Waylon Jennings playing cards.
But the aching, perfect gem from This Dress is "Her Purse," which may be the most moving poem in Sparks' catalog. Through the single, extended metaphor of the spilled contents of a purse, Sparks manages both to divulge the secrets of and to raise from the dead not only a single life, but the life of a culture. It is that rarest of achievements: a work so beautiful you cry and laugh at the same time, even as the crying and laughing have no part of each other. Sparks herself credits Conn, who wrote the music and played piano for the poem, for the power of the piece: "When we were working on it, Steve would play me what he was thinking and I couldn't get through the piece without crying. He was breaking my heart."
While she has no exact contemporaries to feed off or nurture, or even simply to compare notes with, Sparks has found a home in the Nashville music community. "I hear about how cutthroat the music business in Nashville is," she says. "How evil it is and everyone hates it. But my experience has been the opposite. And maybe it's because I'm dealing more with artists in Americana, but the graciousness of people who are brilliant at what they do, how open that community has been, has been mindblowing. And it's surprising only because all you ever hear is, 'The music business sucks, people suck, everybody's greedy.' "
That optimism is a striking contrast to the darker aspects of Sparks' work. On her newest release, Sin Sick, in even the funniest or most dramatically straightforward poems there's an undercurrent of grief for the world. Swept along in that mournful undercurrent is grief's closest kin, unrequited longing. Sparks' poems shout a desire for what their author seems to know can never be: a well world. The best one can hope for is hope itself, and then to act on that hope. Her characters have a kind of courageous faith in themselves and in the world around them, whether warranted or not, and her characters can and often do suffer for that faith. It is for precisely this reason that we care so much about them. As the divinity school dropout puts it, Sin Sick is "a theological treatise, Minton Sparks style."
It's not clear who's sin sick and who isn't on the album's masterful and brooding first track, "Sin Sick Soul." The poem begins:
They did it in the grade school infirmary
'cause she kept the clinic twice a week.
He's a Church of Christ deacon,
she's a V.P. of the D.A.R.
A match made in heaven.
'Cept he's married, and 30 years her senior.
The poem's initial suspense—will Roy leave his wife for Wanda?—soon gives way to an eerie refrain:
He says he might as well
blow a hole in his head.
He's better off dead than sic
the dog of divorce on his soul.
While the listener by this point has a good idea what's eventually going to happen (and it ain't pretty), the wonder of the poem is in Sparks' telling. It is a telling that implicates everyone and no one simultaneously in a story about religion, sin, love and death. The poem is remarkable for its equanimity, realizing that what we call good and evil exist within people and not in some space between them, and, furthermore, that good and evil exist in equal measure.
The finale of Sparks' historical trilogy, Sin Sick is situated mostly in the contemporary South. The stories she tells on this record are more intricate and nuanced than on her previous releases, and a bit darker, too. On "Aunt Shines Face Lift," the narrator's aunt takes on extra jobs to pay for cosmetic surgery, and while the narrator comments, "I admit she looked downright decent / at her mama's funeral," she finishes the poem with a somber understanding:
Too bad we can't reteach a girl her loveliness.
Say what you will.
The distance has been distorted.
The distance between our families living
and our families dying.
Sparks' trilogy is a faithful and moving attempt to close that distance.
Minton Sparks will perform at The Basement, 1604 Eighth Ave S., Aug. 5 at 7 p.m.
