Lloyd Arrington Sparks (July 29, 1933 – February 11, 2024), known professionally as Randy Sparks, was an American musician, singer-songwriter, and founder of The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority.
Lloyd Arrington Sparks was born in Leavenworth, Kansas. He grew up in Oakland, California, and briefly attended the University of California Berkeley before dropping out to write songs. That got him drafted, although he ended up in the Navy, aboard the aircraft carrier Princeton. He won talent competitions, first aboard the Princeton and later Navy-wide which in turn got him some broader recognition when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. After discharge from the Navy, he toured with Bob Hope and had some acting roles, including the lead in the 1960 crime thriller, “The Big Night.”
He appeared on many of the variety shows that were a staple of the late Fifties and early Sixties television, playing mostly calypso music. He switched to folk music in 1959 because it was becoming more popular. But his two solo albums, “Randy Sparks” (1958) and “Walkin’ the Low Road” (1959), went nowhere although the title single from the album reached the Cashbox magazine top 60.
In 1960, he formed a trio called "The Randy Sparks Three", and they released an album of the same name. The New Christy Minstrels began a year later when Sparks saw the possibility of putting together an ensemble of ten voices, big enough generate a major sound but retaining the basic texture of a folk trio. He combined his own trio with the Inn Group, which included a young Jerry Yester, and added four more members, including Dolan Ellis and also Art Podell, who had been part of the duo Art & Paul. The group name came from Christy's Minstrels, a 19th century performing institution founded by Edwin Pearce Christy (1815-1862).
Under Sparks’ leadership, the New Christy Minstrels achieved commercial success. Their debut album, “Presenting the New Christy Minstrels” won the Grammy Award for best performance by a chorus and stayed on the Billboard chart for two years. The groups success was in considerable part a result of Sparks’ relentless marketing of his folk group. He had connections from his earlier careers, and he used them, with the Minstrels appearing on 26 episodes of “The Andy Williams Show,” a popular variety series on NBC, and eight episodes of the folk-oriented ABC show “Hootenanny.”
The folk music scene previously had been a coffee shop and college campus phenomenon; Sparks brought it to national television and much larger venues. That effort reached its apotheosis when the Minstrels got their own summer season TV show, “Ford Presents the New Christy Minstrels,” in 1964.
At the same time, 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. Sparks was also influential in helping boost the careers of Steve Martin, John Denver and Kenny Rogers, with Rogers playing double bass for the group in 1966.
Besides his work with the New Christy Minstrels, Sparks also wrote for other artists and was involved in various musical projects throughout his career. He was a significant figure in the music industry, particularly the folk music scene. 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-1960s, Sparks sold his interest in the New Christy Minstrels for $2.5 million and moved to rural Northern California. There, he began a 30-year collaboration with Burl Ives and opened a nightclub in Los Angeles called Ledbetter’s.
After Ives died in 1995, Sparks bought back the Minstrels and for the next 25 years managed them and sometimes performed with them, mostly in local venues in Northern California. 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.” Sparks was living on his 168-acre ranch in Jenny Lind, Calif., northeast of San Francisco, until a few days before his death.
Sparks died at an assisted-living facility in San Diego on February 11, 2024, at the age of 90.
(Edited from Wikipedia, Wickersham’s Conscience, Washington Post & All Music)
