By Marshall Chapman | May/June 08 | 

Minton Sparks Catches Fire

The love child of Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams lights up the stage

Imagine, if you will, Flannery O'Connor and the ghost of Hank Williams having an affair that results in the birth of an illegitimate child. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, then you know this is not completely out of the realm of possibility. O’Connor and Williams were born within a year and a half of each other. They both grew up in the Deep South. And they both got around: Hank’s touring took him to juke joints all over Georgia — to Columbus, Macon, and possibly even to Milledgeville. So it could have happened. In fact, I would swear on a stack of Bibles that it did. I have seen Minton Sparks. And if she’s not the ghost child of the woman who wrote Wise Blood and the man who sang “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” then cotton doesn’t grow in a cotton field.

I have a theory that the music we hear as we come of age imprints itself on our souls like no other. As a child in South Carolina, I saw Elvis at the Carolina Theater in downtown Spartanburg. At thirteen, I saw Little Stevie Wonder and Jackie Wilson at Spartanburg’s Memorial Auditorium. Two years later, I saw the Shirelles at the National Guard Armory in Sumter, and Loretta Lynn at Greenville’s Memorial Auditorium. James Brown and his Famous Flames, Ray Charles, Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs…I saw them all. These days, whenever anyone asks me to go out, I usually decline. If it’s not going to be a life-changing experience, I’d just as soon stay home. Maybe I’m jaded, I don’t know.

Minton Sparks cuts through jaded like a stiletto. For the uninitiated, her weapon of choice is words. Her fans include singer John Prine and novelist Dorothy Allison, a South Carolina native, who writes, “Minton Sparks sounds like my momma, my Aunt Dot, my Aunt Grace, and even a bit like my Uncle Jack only better and wilder and heartbreakingly more powerful. 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.”

Sparks walks out on stage looking like some woman who took a wrong turn from a Ladies Auxiliary meeting in rural Tennessee circa 1950, clutching a bone pocketbook containing god-only-knows what. Mints? A change purse? A pearl-handled pistol? An empty tube of lipstick? A prescription for Valium? Who knows? Her only prop besides the pocketbook is versatile guitarist John Jackson (who played with Bob Dylan). It’s a nice touch, but you get the feeling she could carry it alone. The only thing she really needs are all those gut-wrenching Southern Gothic stories based on members of her family that swirl around inside her head.

Seeing Minton Sparks perform live is like being in a room with a snake. It may or may not be poisonous, but it doesn’t matter. You’re not taking your eyes off the snake. She stands at the microphone with a faraway look, then squints out beyond the spotlight, drawing you into her world before she ever speaks a line: “Anybody here ever been in love with a Peeping Tom?” Her words come at you like a yin version of Big Daddy bellowing “I smell mendacity!” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.