Between the Mountains and the Valley with Sparky Rucker

It is merely by coincidence it happens to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day when veteran civil rights activist and living archive of American folk music Sparky Rucker drops by a sandwich shop to talk about his remarkable career.

It is the only afternoon Sparky and his soulmate and musical partner, Rhonda Rucker, have to spare for an interview. Rucker is nonplussed that it is this particular day, when Americans also happen to be deciding for the first time in history whether to vote for a black man or woman for president. The Ruckers are just stuck in tour limbo while they await car repairs. All the same, it is a dilemma rabble-rousers from the '60s might say we should be glad to have.

The Ruckers are promoting their new album The Mountains Above and the Valleys Below (Treemont Productions). Mountains, with its blend of mountain tunes, Celtic laments, Civil War songs and spirituals, includes "Ain’t Gonna Throw It Away," which should become the anthem of the recycle-reuse bandwagon. The album cements Rhonda’s maturation as part of the Rucker traveling show since the couple's first outings 20 years ago. Husband and wife provide all the instrumentation on Mountains — guitar, banjo, piano, harmonica and bones — with only a little vocal help from Kristin and "Hobo" Bill Morris. When played on a computer, the CD provides background on the songs as well as extensive liner notes written by Rhonda. The Maryville couple's son, 16-year-old Jamie, wi-fi’ing on his laptop a few tables away at Panera’s, provided much of the photography and design work for Mountains.

HE COULDA BEEN AN ART HISTORIAN...

“It was through the church that the singing really started,” says Rucker. “Grandfather John Lindsay Rucker was a bishop in the Church of God Sanctified in Knoxville — that’s the 'black' Church of God. He had his church on Patton Street. The big tabernacle was in Nashville where the church is headquartered, but he lived in Knoxville. He had 12 kids — six girls and six boys — one of whom was my father, a policeman in a city with a very short history of black lawmen: James David Rucker. I'm his junior.

“An aunt thought I had sparkly eyes so that's how I became ‘Sparky.’ Anyway, you had to have a nickname.”

Rucker sang in choirs at church and at Beardsley Junior and Austin High schools “but I was always fooling around with street corner singing — doo-wop — and started playing with electric instruments after starting at UT.”

Rucker was at the University of Tennessee from 1964 to 1970, starting out in zoology but graduating with a degree in art education. Like most young people at the time, Rucker was caught up in the tumult of the times. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing, and there was growing alarm about America's escalating military misadventure in Vietnam. The local folk music scene opened Rucker's eyes to the use of music for protest.

“I started hanging out with and listening to folk singers like Robbie Hopkins and Russell Smith (later of The Amazing Rhythm Aces),” he says. “Russell "The Muscle" and Rick Brown and I formed a folk trio. A singer named Nancy Hendrix-Jones was like our Joan Baez. That was a lot of fun, singing at the ‘liberal religious youth’ coffeehouses operated by [some of the progressive] churches around town.”

At the same time, Rucker continued to experiment with rock 'n' roll, including an odd, short-lived combo with old high school pal Ozel James and people he met at UT like Jim Organ, “one of the first, real hip DJs in Knoxville.” Organ, Rucker remembers, “was a white guy, a great guitar player, who had this idea we should put together an integrated band.”

So, Rucker in the mid-'60s was living parallel lives: earnest folkie in the coffeehouses and Beatle-jacketed, skinny tie-wearing rocker in the frat houses.

“At no time did I ever think this was something I could do to make a living. After all, I was a zoology student at UT. Around 1965 I realized — BOOM! —I didn't want to be around conservatives in white lab coats. After all, I was spending all my time [on campus] at The Round Table in the Student Center where the beatniks, poets, art students, theater-nerds and UT's handful of blacks sat together.”

Sparky's