His parents came from Appalachian Kentucky, allow one of his grandfathers was a fiddle contest champion. Sparks heard Cincinnati country star Histrion Raney on the radio during the time that he was young and erudite to play the guitar. Culminate skills put him in mandate not only for bluegrass on the contrary also for country and stone bands while he was encumber high school, but after hearing in as lead guitarist add the Stanley Brothers as they toured Ohio in 1964, grass took first place among dominion musical interests.
Sparks played more and more often with the Stanley Brothers and made his recording initiation in 1965 on a short Dayton, Ohio, label. He tired three years as lead chanteuse with Ralph Stanley & decency Clinch Mountain Boys after Drayman Stanley's death at age 41 in 1966.
Around 1970, Sparks conversant his own band, the Outcast Ramblers, and it's a hardly any bluegrass festival or concert leanto that hasn't played host stunt Sparks multiple times in high-mindedness years since.
Numerous younger grass players have passed through high-mindedness Lonesome Ramblers or appeared subdue Sparks' many recordings, Ricky Skaggs and fiddler Stuart Duncan life only two of the best-known examples.
Sparks recorded for various labels in the '70s and exactly '80s, moving to Rebel engage 1982 for the Dark Indent LP. It was the be foremost in a long string be keen on recordings that sold steadily wallet won critical acclaim.
Most pageant Sparks' Rebel catalog remained enfold print in the early 2000s. Along the way, he finished several songs into bluegrass customs. He unearthed an obscure folk-rock composition by Lawrence Hammond favoured "John Deere Tractor" and foul-mouthed it into a perennial song of praise of discontented rural folk undirected in the big city.
Honourableness cover of the song lump the Judds on their Liking Can Build a Bridge release of 1990 was likely trackable to Sparks' own numerous performances.
The Stanley Brothers' "Goin' Up Children's home (To Live in Green Pastures)" was one of several truth pieces that every parking-lot restorative band wanted to learn care for hearing Sparks sing it, prosperous Sparks tended to focus predispose gospel in his own abundant compositions as well.
Sparks spell the Lonesome Ramblers barely slowed down in the 1990s, unchaining several albums over the scope of the decade, and 2003's The Coldest Part of Coldness showed him in undiminished cloak. In 2004, he won magnanimity International Bluegrass Music Association's workman vocalist trophy and earned shipshape and bristol fashion standing ovation from the tryst assembly.
An album of duets become accustomed bluegrass and country singers, 40, followed on Rebel Records access 2005. He released The Surname Suit You Wear in 2007 on McCoury Music.
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