Randy Sparks, a folk music maestro who crafted choral odes, ballads and ditties of droll wit such as “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” during the 1960s folk revival and who nurtured a host of future stars including Kenny Rogers and John Denver, died Feb. 11 in San Diego. He was 90.
Mr. Sparks had health problems including heart trouble, said his son, Cameron Sparks. Mr. Sparks, who lived in Mokelumne Hill, Calif., was under medical care at his son’s home.
Amid the range of folk and roots music that flourished before the rock revolution — from the activist strains of Pete Seeger to the pop-style sound of the Kingston Trio — Mr. Sparks flexed his versatility. He defied easy labeling as a songwriter and leader of troupes including the New Christy Minstrels and the Back Porch Majority.
Those groups became Mr. Sparks’s laboratory for his Americana songbook that was deeply influenced by the storytelling lyricism and harmonic mixes of his idol, Burl Ives. The revolving makeup of Mr. Sparks’s ensembles also was a steppingstone for some star-studded alumni including country great Rogers, singer-songwriter Kim Carnes and Gene Clark, a founding member of the folk-rock band the Byrds. A longtime member, Barry McGuire, was known for his version of the 1965 antiwar anthem “Eve of Destruction” written by P.F. Sloan.
Mr. Sparks came across another young singer in the 1960s by the name of Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., who Mr. Sparks let stay rent-free in an apartment above his garage in Los Angeles and, according to Mr. Sparks, persuaded him to change his name to John Denver — although Denver long asserted his name was an homage to his love for the Rocky Mountains.
“That is absolutely false,” Mr. Sparks wrote in a letter to the Sacramento PBS station KVIE in 2006. “How do I know? I was there.”
Mr. Sparks helped bring a new dimension to modern folk music by literally thinking big. In the late 1950s, he was still pursuing a combo career as songwriter and actor. He had missed out on a part in “Thunder Road,” a 1958 film starring Robert Mitchum as a Tennessee moonshine runner. But Mr. Sparks sang the movie’s opening song, which he co-wrote with Mitchum.
Then in 1960, while in Vancouver doing a folk club gig, Mr. Sparks came across a biography of the 19th-century American song-weaver Stephen Foster, whose works such as “Oh! Susanna” and “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair” were made popular by a band known as Christy’s Minstrels after their leader, composer and actor Edwin P. Christy. (Christy was later regarded as notorious for his use of blackface singers.)
Mr. Sparks was intrigued by just one aspect of the Christy’s showmanship, the dozen or more musicians he used for harmonies and overlapping tones. He decided to give the concept a reboot, seeking to blend troubadour musical style of small acts with the choral sweep of multiple voices.
The New Christy Minstrels became an ever-shifting collection of about 10 singers and musicians. The “big band of folk music,” said some promoters. The group’s rise was so swift that Mr. Sparks quipped that he barely had time to change out of his jeans and into a tuxedo.
The group’s 1962 debut album, “Presenting the New Christy Minstrels,” which included the Woody Guthrie classic “This Land Is Your Land,” won a Grammy Award for best performance as a chorus. National television appearances followed, including a season-long stint on “The Andy Williams Show.” At the New York World’s Fair grounds in 1964, Mr. Sparks and the group filmed a commercial introducing Ford’s new Mustang.
The group headlined at Carnegie Hall in New York, Cocoanut Grove and Hollywood’s Greek Theater. The New Christy Minstrels then found a wider audience with songs getting radio play such as 1963′s “Green, Green” (co-written with McGuire) and the haunting “Today,” which was part of the soundtrack for the 1964 comedy film “Advance to the Rear.”
Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I'll taste your strawberries, I'll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
Ere I forget all the joy that is mine today
“It’s incredible. It’s unpredictable, delightful,” Mr. Sparks once said during the rise of the New Christy Minstrels. “It’s crazy what’s happening.”
At the same time, Mr. Sparks was cultivating another group, the Back Porch Majority, as a kind of smaller farm team for the New Christy Minstrels. The group became a force in its own right, cutting five albums and performing in 1964 for President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson.
In 1967, Mr. Sparks was touring with the Back Porch Majority in Michigan and discovered they had a rare Saturday night with no gig. They decided to hit the town in Toledo, Mr. Sparks recalled.
The group showed up in the city at about 10 p.m. “And it was closed,” Mr. Sparks recalled, feigning surprise that the bars and restaurants were mostly shut. “Do you know how rude that is?” The next day, Mr. Sparks worked on the lyrics for “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio,” which Denver later made more popular by adding to his concert repertoire.
Oh, but after the sunset, the dusk and the twilight
When shadows of night start to fall
They roll back the sidewalks precisely at ten
And the people who live there are not seen again.
The folk music scene waned as rock became king, leading even Bob Dylan to stun his fans by switching to an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Mr. Sparks, however, kept at his craft as the spotlight largely shifted away.
In the mid-1990s, he brought together some of the earlier members of the New Christy Minstrels to go back on the road. They toured for decades. (He had sold his share of the group to its managers in 1964 and had bought back the rights in the 1990s.)
“If we weren’t so damn old,” he joked to audiences, “we’d have a future.” The 2003 mockumentary “A Mighty Wind” featured a fictitious band called the New Main Street Singers — which was widely seen as a nod to Mr. Sparks’s New Christy Minstrels.
“That’s us!” Mr. Sparks told the Arizona Republic, laughing.
Navy talent winner
Randy Lloyd Sparks was born on July 29, 1933, in Leavenworth, Kan., and was raised in Oakland, Calif. His father was a dock worker and his mother did genealogy research for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons.
Mr. Sparks studied zoology at San Diego State University without finishing his degree. He entered the Navy in 1956 and joined up with another sailor, Ralph Grasso, for Navy talent contests. They won twice and landed television appearances on “The Bob Hope Show” and others. (Mitchum saw the performances and later recruited Grasso and Mr. Sparks for “Thunder Road,” in which Mr. Sparks also had an uncredited cameo role.)
Mr. Sparks began as a solo act around San Francisco’s North Beach at clubs including the Purple Onion, where comedian Phyllis Diller and poet Maya Angelou sometimes took the stage. He released two albums, “Randy Sparks” in 1958 and “Walkin’ the Low Road” a year later.
In 1960, he starred that year in the film drama “The Big Night” and later that decade ran a music club, Ledbetter’s, in Los Angeles that became a centerpiece of city’s folk music scene. Mr. Sparks gave a young banjo-playing, magic-conjuring Steve Martin an early shot onstage.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mr. Sparks wrote and performed “Just Americans” with some of his old bandmates as Randy Sparks & The Minstrels. “That’s a lot of longevity,” Mr. Sparks said in a 2008 interview with the Riverside Press-Enterprise while driving between gigs in New Mexico, some of the estimated 140 shows he did a year well into his 80s.
His first marriage, to Jackie Miller, ended in divorce. He was then married to actress Diane Jergens from 1962 until her death in 2018. Survivors include their four children, Cameron, Kevin, Amanda and Melinda; a sister; six grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.
At a concert in Lodi, Calif., in 2019, the 86-year-old Mr. Sparks was asked if he planned to stop touring. “Hell, no,” he replied. “I’m not retiring. I love being a songwriter. What a joy.”
