KNOXVILLE -- For over 50 years, Sparky Rucker has been changing the world through stories and song. He and his wife, Rhonda, have carried their message to stages and classrooms all over the country. Knox County Public Library is pleased to present Sparky & Rhonda Rucker in a performance of “Heroes and Hard Times: American History Through Song and Story” on Sunday, September 15 at 3:00 pm in the auditorium of the East Tennessee History Center at 601 Gay Street. Admission is free.
Sparky Rucker grew up in Knoxville and comes from a long line of preachers and law enforcement officers. He was in the forefront of the Civil Rights movement in Knoxville and nationally as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Poor Peoples Campaign. At marches and rallies, he played freedom songs alongside Pete Seeger, Guy Carawan, Bernice Reagon and others.
Mr. Rucker worked on behalf of coal miners as a staff member of the Council of the Southern Mountains. After graduating from UT, he taught school in Chattanooga before deciding to become a full-time musician. He has toured and performed with the luminaries of folk music such as John D. Loudermilk, Ola Belle Reed, Dock Boggs, Hazel Dickens, Nimrod Workman and Bessie Jones.
Rhonda Hicks Rucker grew up in Louisville, Kentucky where she took piano lessons from a ragtime composer and church organist who influenced her barrelhouse piano playing and rocking gospel melodies. Through the Methodist church, she learned many of the old hymns and gospel songs that are part of her music today.
Hicks is a medical doctor as well, and it was during her residency in the small towns of eastern Kentucky that Dr. Rucker learned the “art of medicine” as well as absorbing the heritage and culture of Southern Appalachia. She is an accomplished writer as well and her first novel, Swing Low, Sweet Harriet, is to be published this year. In 1989, she began performing on stage with her husband. Together they have performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and on A Prairie Home Companion.
“Heroes and Hard Times” takes the audience on a journey that spans over three centuries of American history, including slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, the birth of blues music, and the civil rights movement. This concert is the first in a series of Sunday and Thursday concerts to be presented in the friendly low-key atmosphere that is the public library.
