“They say lightning never strikes twice. At our house, White Lightning struck every night. A painful past will make you a walking target, like a lonely pine in an open field.” When Minton Sparks first wrote those words, I imagine ol’ Hank was smiling up there in Hillbilly Heaven. After all, only he — the man who created “The silence of a fallen star lights up a purple sky / And as I wonder where you are I’m so lonesome I could cry” — only he would truly understand where his darling illegitimate ghost child daughter was coming from.

I ask Sparks what inspires her to write and perform her poems.

“Well…” she says, “the answer to that changes a little each time I think about it. The stories I heard as a child often portrayed the women in my family as ‘utterly convincing domestic actresses’ — a description I love, but one I learned is not the case at all.

“The breadth and depth of their will and spirit were quite different from what I was led to believe. So I gave myself the exercise to find the redemptive under-song in the events of their lives — imagining what these characters would tell somebody who would really listen, if they were standing in a space of freedom from real or imagined constrictions.

“I also wanted my children to know who the hell they came from on my side of the family,” Sparks says, not joking. “That may seem odd, because the stories often tell a darkish side, but I think that’s the juicy side — the alive side.”

“Like the old adage: ‘The Devil writes better songs,’” I say.

“Exactly,” she says, laughing.

Her DVD Open Casket features sixteen of Sparks’ best-known pieces, including “Aunt Shine’s Facelift” (“Ever since she was a child, Aunt Shine took real pains with her looks”); “Vickie Pickle’s Momma” (“If the heart won’t break, the mind will shatter it into a million pieces”); “Ambulance Chaser” (“Highway 50 fights us like a wet cat locked in a dollhouse”); and “Ghosted” (“You kind of lose something when your name ain’t called, when your face ain’t seen, your beauty gets buried… He’d made a ghost of her, staring straight through her at the TV, nursing Buds, acting in public like he didn’t know who on earth she was”). When Sparks speaks these lines, her voice is like music, like a river that carries you along.

Along the way, Sparks has recorded several CDs — Middlin’ Sisters (2001), This Dress (2003), and Sin Sick (2005). She’s recorded with everybody from Maura O’Connell and Keb’ Mo’ to Waylon Jennings and Chris Thile (Nickel Creek). Her second book, a novella called White Lightning, is due out in May. Her first, Desperate Ransom: Setting Her Family Free, opens with “I sassed her, and in some ways, I’m still paying for it.” This is all great stuff, but seeing her live is the ticket.

You can look at a picture of a snake, or see a video of one, but unless you’re in the same room with it, the hairs don’t stand up on the back of your neck. Like Elvis in ’56 or Jackie Wilson in ’62 or Loretta Lynn in ’64, seeing Minton Sparks in the flesh can be a mind-altering experience.

So how does one explain talent like this? Where did Minton Sparks come from? The record books show she was born on February 27, 1962, at the Rutherford County Hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But if you look real closely at the birth certificate, you’ll see “Mother: Mary Flannery O’Connor.” And next to that, in faded, barely legible letters: “Father: Hiram King Williams.”