Minton Sparks at the Cumberland Mountain Storytelling Festival, Palace Theater, Crossville, Tennessee, November 1, 2013

Abstract

Minton Sparks takes the stage of the Palace Theater in Crossville, Tennessee, like an avenging angel of the order of rural Southern womanhood. Carpetbag dress and sensible heels, bone leather purse broad and deep enough to carry a family Bible and a .44 Magnum, she stakes out a tight arc between the music stand freighted down with texts at her right hand and her remarkable musician John Jackson to her left behind a palisade of guitars and foot pedals. She paces that stage space, one hand clutching the mic to her chin and the other hand treading air as if weighing whether to preach or to fly. In one piece she struts like a gaggle of gossiping hens. In another she opens that purse, inventorying the contents of a life both lived and unlived, revealed and deeply hidden even from its bearer. Her performance poetry brims with unconstrained voices, conversing in a glossolalia both intelligible and opaque, though all the words and phrases are from some channeled font of Delta English.Hers is a sturdy, evocative performance persona: outer garment of tough feminine Americana imagery and attitude, with an inner lining blended of literary and slam poetry techniques, all stitched together with a satiny underscoring of blues licks and hymn tunes. It is a fabric that is unique on the storytelling circuit, at least in the United States, where music, poetry, and narration tend to be broken into more discrete segments. Diane Ferlatte's recent work with Eric Pearson combines traditional and personal narratives with blues guitar accompaniments, and tandem duos such as Barry Marshall and Jere Burns of the Storycrafters often weave musical interplay into their arrangements. In the early 1990s the late Julie Portman and husband Paul Reisler performed fully accompanied theatrical narratives, one-woman plays with guitar and dulcimer backdrops that stylisti- cally seemed to just miss connecting with storytelling audiences. Collaborations between storytellers and musical accompanists are relatively common in Britain (e.g., Hugh Lupton with Chris Wood on fiddle and guitar, Xanthe Gresham with Arash Moradi on frame drum and saz, Robin Williamson with his own folk harp), where the connection to bardic antecedents are vividly sensed and sought. There are a number of singer-songwriters whose mix of folk ballads and elaborated song introductions constitute a subgenre on festival stages. What sets Sparks apart in this era is the cool precision of her free-verse narratives in visual and aural coun- terpart with the unsettling fidelity of her vocal and clothing impersonations-all eerily echoed by flowing guitar loops drawn from the John Fahey catalogue of ruminative American Gothic.A flaking, putrid pink-skinned womandecays in a four-poster bed,eyes the size of chicken eggsthat could have been laid this morningand sold this afternoon . . .faceless relatives shuffling around her bed,embarrassed to acknowledge the specter.Images this stark are vanishingly rare in the storytelling world constituted around family-friendly events. Yet the literary format relieves the audience of its habitual guilty retreat into sentimentality. Sparks's oral interpretive stance poses her fixed texts as sensed intermediaries between performer and audience, absolving them of the social obligation to play nice. The peculiar sprung torsion of the free-verse lines repels conventional resolutions, and her narratives suspend themselves in contemplative space, balanced on the point of a fading guitar note in a bracing solution of wonder and horror.The Palace Theater is a vintage small-town Main Street movie house, lovingly restored as an arts center. The proscenium is elevated above the usual height of a storytelling platform, and the seats, tilted backward toward the stage, are rather too comfortable for full alertness on the part of the genteel, snowy-headed audi- ence. This is the conservative, Medicare-eligible demographic that has overrun the festival-based flank of the storytelling movement, while younger, hipper audiences have gravitated toward open-mic Moth-style personal story nights now filling urban venues. …