Sparks talks like Lucinda Williams sings; low, bed-headed and husky
with sin, either remembered or imagined. In the syncopated monologues
on her new spoken-word album, THIS DRESS, your gas-pumping mama, your
fellow Baptists and your unmentionable relatives occupy every slot on
the Waffle House jukebox, and when musical guests like Keb'Mos' and
Maura O'Connell chime in, you can even dance to 'em.

                                                                   ---Jim Ridley Nashville Scene

With a voice born for gospel and a word artistry that makes you laugh
and weep by turns, Sparks offers poems sorrowful and hilarious about
the land of the double-wides.

                                                                        ---SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT (June 2005)

The Nashville poet and storyteller unearthed another set of wondrous
vignettes that once again drew an unforgettable picture of life in the
South. Sparks has a unique niche that soulfully marries the Southern
storytelling tradition with the strains of old-time music for a hybrid
that is all her own.

                                                                            ---Mary Houlihan Chicago Sun Times

There's no one quite like Sparks on the contemporary music scene--no
one with her ability to find and describe the haunting rhythms of this
world in such precise, unadorned terms.

                                                                  ---PERFORMING SONGWRITER (MAY 2004)

THE TENNESSEAN   May 7, 2006
Rodney Crowell Sings Minton Sparks' praises
by Fiona Soltes

"Rodney Crowell is a fan.  Not just any fan, mind you, but an unabashed, unapologetic, enthusiastic, gushing admirer of Minton Sparks.  So much so that he once bought 60 CDs from the trunk of her car.  'I'm just captivated by language' he says.   'And Minton Sparks is a master."  Some might say the same about Crowell; winner of a Grammy, an ASCAP Creative Acheivement Award and a spot in the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame, he has his own share of devoted followers.  And yet, for Crowell, taking part in "Minton Sparks & Friends@TPAC - The Voices of Today" Saturday is a chance to be 'close to greatness.'"

THE NASHVILLE SCENE   July 28, 2005
love.death.sex.sin by Pablo Tanguay

"The term performance artist, while technically correct, hardly does Sparks justice.  She does not stick knives into her eye sockets or dip herself in chocolate.  But calling her simply a poet, an actress or a musician is equally unjust. The fact is, Sparks defies genre, incorporating what she needs of all these arts into her performance at any given moment.  She has been favorably compared to Minnie Pearl.  While these performers share a sense of fashion and a rural Tennesee heritage, Pearl's repetoire, which featured gentle satires of the folks back home, pales besides Sparks' explosive narratives of Southern madness, grief, lust, love and survival.  Sparks, on stage, lives her stories, alternating between narrator and participant.  Watching her perform this trick is spellbinding.  She is a storyteller one moment, her Aunt Evie the next.  But what is most shocking, and what invites the comparisons to Pearl, is how funny Sparks is.  She dances, she tells topical jokes, she makes funny faces.  In fact, the most bizarre aspect of a Sparks performance is how often - and how much - an audience laughs as she enacts her Gothic yarns."

SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT-June 2005
Southern Sparks by Barry Spacks

"You're a talker!" - Musician Keb' Mo', to Minton Sparks 
SINGING PRAISES: I've always been a pushover for Southern girls, so I
perked up when I heard that Minton Sparks was performing at Trinity
Backstage on State Street, a church hall transformed into something
like a late-'60s Greenwich Village coffeehouse. With a voice born for
gospel and a word artistry that makes you laugh and weep by turns,
Sparks offers poems sorrowful and hilarious about the land of the
double-wides. As the jacket copy of her CD This Dress puts it, she's
"the greatest country singer who doesn't sing."
Well, she does sing, and buck-dance, but mainly she puts on a
one-woman show poised between spoken word and performance art. A
psychology counselor and teacher at Tennessee State when not touring,
Sparks performs and records with musical support from such folks as
John Jackson, Darryl Scott, and Nickel Creek's Chris Thile. Play
between words and music turns her story-pieces into what she terms
"conversations." Here in town last Saturday night, she
"conversed" with the skilled Doug Clegg, as inventive as a
scatting jazzman as he is on fiddle, mandolin, keyboards, and guitar.
Talking with Sparks the day before her concert, I learned that the
world of country doesn't quite know where to place her work. As my
equally Southern wife Kimberley Snow likes to say about book
placement, "Put it right up next to the cash register."
Sure, there are those country lifestyle lovers who quail at the
mention of poetry, but anyone who might favor Waylon Jennings or John
Prine will find Minton Sparks a major tonic.
The monthly Trinity Backstage series draws a crowd expecting music,
this time supplied by the poetic songwriting of our own power-singer
Kate Wallace. And there was ambitious word-work, too, from poet
Vincent Stanley, who even read two lengthy poem-commentaries on
Milton's Paradise Lost without losing a beat of concentration from his
listeners. Wallace, who's Sparks' best friend and tireless promoter,
followed these poems with songs of angels and devils, the whole show
graced by an air of flawless improvisation. As for her friend, Wallace
summed up Sparks by noting that she "channels the Jungian
archetype of basic Southern womanhood."
Sparks does so by transporting the aching sadness of desire and easy
violence into a praise of the savor of survival and hard living. She
gives us "sinister rooms" at the back of failing country
stores, Uncle Brother who'd have you brush a relative's "death
hair," lovers on river walks at barn dark, families eating fried
okra and field beans, and, always, a preacher calling "O sinner
come home." Titles of a few of her pieces suggest what she's
about: "Sorrow Knows This Dress," "When You Coming
Home, Girl," "Dance Caller at the Marco Polo Park,"
"Momma Flies a Car." Listeners will find no lack of humor in this work, along with card
playing, heavy drinking, gun brandishing, wayward grandfathers,
rusted-out trucks, housedresses, Mississippi moonshine, and
"country dances in the hot, steamy Southern night."
A third Sparks CD appears this June. Sin Sick will continue Minton's
transformation of anecdote into revelation, but as she puts it,
"in a more theological vein." Her earlier poems, though, are
already no strangers to heavyweight thematics - for instance, the
philandering older man who can only choose suicide as a way to deal
with "the sic of the dog of divorce on his soul.

"PERFORMING SONGWRITER-MAY 2004

There's no one quite like Sparks on the
contemporary music scene--no one with her ability to find and describe
the haunting rhythms of this world in such precise, unadorned terms.

Thom Jurek of ALL MUSIC GUIDE says..."Minton Sparks is a treasure
whose imprint is only now being traced upon the culture; when the full
weight of it comes to bear, don't say you weren't warned. The Middlin'
Sisters album is the finest spoken word recording issued in America in
over 10 years".

NO DEPRESSION-Luke Torn
Like a backwoods Lucinda Williams or Gillian Welch, or perhaps more
accurately, an existentialist Jo Carol Pierce, Minton Sparks has an
eye for detail and a flair for storytelling that marks her as an
unmitigated original.REVIEWS FOR SIN SICK:

HARP MAGAZINE:
By Randy Harward

On her third album, poet, storyteller, buck dancer and spoken-word artist Minton Sparks isn't doing much different than on her previous releases (2001's Middlin' Sisters and 2003's This Dress). She's rightly sticking with what works: quaint but stark raps about Southern life and its sundry characters, layered over plaintive old-timey acoustic vamping (courtesy Nickel Creek's Chris Thile, newcomer banjoist/singer-songwriter Abigail Washburn and blues pianist Steve Conn). Although it's derivative-she siphons from Lake Wobegon, This American Life, John Sinclair, Jim Morrison-Sparks' shtick is charming and intriguing. With a sweet twangy tone, she cultivates rapt interest in her characters and their situations. As they're ordering "curly fries and a Co' Cola," worrying "the heads of their privates don't strain the wild floral Hawaiian fabric" or how they "kinda lose something when your name ain't called," they become us and we become them. Consequently, we live Sin Sick instead of listen to it.

Review by Shelton Ivany:

Sin Sick" would best be described as a combination of spoken word poetry and country. The fact that we don't hear anything like Minton Sparks on MTV or any major radio is proof that this county lacks any sort of class or culture. Minton Sparks has a rich gift for melodies and poetry. She sings with remarkable emotions about love, pain and everything the heart can feel. I hate to compare her to anyone else, but Minton reminds me of Billie Holiday. She reminds me of Holiday not in the way she sounds but in how painfully honest and emotional her music is.
This album is a treasure. Each song is a story with Minton's voice so beautifully accompanied by the sounds of such stars as Chis Thile of Nickel Creek and blues pianist Steve Conn. One track even strays away from her country sound with an accordion based waltz. Although the music that backs each story helps it flow so greatly, that is not the key to this album. Sparks creates entire worlds in just a few minutes with her rhythmic storytelling. Her voice emulates each character and each feeling in an almost cinematic style.
The stories are drawn sometimes from her own imagination and sometimes from those around her. In the track "Aunt Shine's Face Lift" she pleads, "to bad we can't re-teach a girl her loveliness" when speaking of the her aunt's plastic surgery.
Unlike her history, I hope her future will be totally different so that we all may know who Minton Sparks is for the rest of our lives. She is truly one of a kind, and should be overlooked no longer.

Reviewer: Jeff Eason
Mountain Times

And now for something completely different.

Folks who love the great tradition of Southern gothic short stories as practiced by writers such as Lee Smith will rejoice in the latest CD release by poet/anecdote writer Minton Sparks. The album is called Sin Sick and features the Sparks’ inimitable short spoken-word pieces with acoustic music backgrounds.

Special guests on the album include Nickel Creek mandolinist Chris Thile, blues piano virtuoso Steve Conn and mountain music newcomer banjo picker Abigail Wahsburn.

Sin Sick is Sparks’ third album and as in her pervious releases—This Dress and Middlin’ Sisters—she mines gold from tales of family, friends and the dark struggles of her Southern soul. This time the cadence of her stories is more in tune with the music than in the past and her delivery ranges from the sermon-like “Sin Sick Soul” to the beat poetry confessional “Dark Socks” to the funky, almost hip-hop rhyme time of the fantastic “Back of the Bus.”

The title of “Back of the Bus” sounds like it might be an appropriately timed tribute to Rosa Parks. Instead, what the listener finds is a raunchy coming of age memoir about teenage boys and girls who stumble through the facts of life on the bus trip back from an away basketball game. It’s though-provoking stuff, and sure to spark (no pun intended) a memory of anybody who suffered through a normal childhood in the South in the 70s and 80s. REVIEWS for THIS DRESS

B^USA TODAY--Brian Mansfield gives Minton a ***1/2 star ovation. Like
one of her characters, Nashville "performance poet" Sparks
lays a story's end out "like a steaming hot breakfast."
Telling tales of a rural Southern past connected to the present by the
thick, molasses-like strands of her drawl. Accompanied by pump organ,
piano or Keb'Mos' slide guitar, Sparks reveals the earthy secrets of a
threadbare daisy=print housedress, a single mother who pumps gas to
put her daughter through school, and a relative's purse that offers up
Butter Rum Lifesavers, Doublement gum and a secret love letter. At the
end of one of Sparks' simile-rich stories, a mother admonishes her
child, "Let's not talk about what just happened" after a
woman walks naked into Sunday morning services. But the low chuckle
that follows tells you everything you need to know.

REVIEW FROM PUREMUSIC.COM

For the growing number of us who enjoyed, indeed, marveled at Minton's
debut Middlin' Sisters, it's clear now that it was only chapter one of
a brilliant saga.
Because I've had the pleasure of seeing Minton Sparks perform live on
several occasions, I can't think of her now without picturing her buck
dancing. At her recent sold out show at the Dark Horse Theater here in
Nashville, I heard she'd busted her kneecap building a snowman with
her kids, and showed up in a walker. She had her purse velcroed to the
contraption, and I heard she used it to buck dance anyway, and days
later she was still paying for it.
But that's the deal. It's even a lot more than just great southern
hillbilly poetry on steroids. The genius of Minton Sparks is breathing
life into the past and blowing it into the present, inhaling the hills
of her childhood and the childhoods of her kin, and exhaling it onto
the page and off the stage. City and country folk alike, she's
knocking 'em dead all the way to New York City.
What makes the humorous and captivating poetry of Minton Sparks so
damn accessible is that she has fabulous musicians backing her up, in
ways that are so laid back and funky that it's easy to just tap your
foot and tune in closely to the pictures she's painting. Portraits of
her gas pumpin mama in the Esso ball cap, the dance caller at the
Marco Polo Park, or her mother's dangerous driving habits in
"Mama Flies A Car."
Producer Steve Conn plays the world class piano for which he's well
known on a quartet of cuts, and pump organ on another. Minton's live
foil Rob Jackson plays a trio of songs on guitar, no banjo on this
record. He's great, so inside the material. On slide guitar, Keb 'Mo
makes a very sharp contribution on "Ambulance Chasers,"
excellent. Maura O'Connell sings sad and lovely a cappella behind
Minton on two, and Tammy Rogers is just kicking ass on the fiddle for
a pair of cuts, I'd love to see her show up at a gig sometime.
You're gonna see this hillbilly poet on TV, mark my words. She's gonna
be famous. She's the real McCoy, -- Frank Goodman

NASHVILLE SCENE-Jim Ridley
A Rutherford County girl who's been to hell and Sewanee, Sparks talks
like Lucinda Williams sings; low, bed-headed and husky with sin,
either remembered or imagined. In the syncopated monologues on her new
spoken-word album, THIS DRESS, your gas-pumping mama, your fellow
Baptists and your unmentionable relatives occupy every slot on the
Waffle House jukebox, and when musical guests like Keb'Mos' and Maura
O'Connell chime in, you can even dance to 'em. Even so, when Sparks
drawls a line like, "Dirty dishes drown in a stainless steel
sink," any accompaniment is reduced to a countermelody.

ALL MUSIC GUIDE-THOM JUREK Why is it that Robert Altman hasn't made a
film from the vignettes of Minton Sparks? Why is it that publishers
aren't banging down her door in order to publish these small
revelations of large truths? On her second full length, Minton Sparks
is the greatest country singer who doesn't sing, a poet in a league
with Lucinda Williams and Charles Williams, a storyteller as fine as
Hazel Dickens; she's without without peer among her generation. On the
follow-up to the remarkable, profound and quietly dazzling Middlin'
Sisters, Ms. Sparks gives us 12 more tomes that are every bit as lean,
every bit as tough as anything to come from Nuyorican Poets Cafe' and
come out of a timeworn tradition that has been documented in field
recordings by Alan Lomax and others in earlier generations but left to
the humid dirt in our own. Here, mothers, sisters, grandfathers,
Waylon Jennings' playing cards, dogs, rusted trucks, trailers, houses
dresses with stars wearing off them, bequeathed handbags, country
dances where, in the hot, steamy Southern night, desire, excitement,
and the desperate nature to hold on to this moment for all its worth
because there may not be another for a month. Mortality is everywhere
on this record, underlining the feeling in the previous
sentence. Sparks' stories have all the immediacy of a hip-hop
narrative, and the emotional depth of a prayer for salvation. But
there is also an acceptance, quiet, plaintive, unadorned by
artifice. Sparks has some awesome help on this set: There's Maura
O'Connell, whose Celtic restrained mournful wail adorns two tracks,
the criminally under appreciated Steve Conn plays bluesed out piano
and organ four more, Tammy Rodgers and her high lonesome fiddle lilt
the fringes of a pair, Rob Jackson, pulls out the fingerpicks on
another couple and Keb Mo' plays a gutbucket bottleneck slide on
another. There is nothing here that suggests anachronism, just a
simpler truth mined for its meaning by the retelling of a story, a
memory, real or imagined, in a poem. MS. Sparks poetry has the same
teeth Rebecca Wells novels have, but they also offer a burning passion
that smolders under a plain cotton dress, and a pair of pointy
eyeglasses that know the secrets that lie sin secrets. Once again,
Ms. Sparks thrills us with her wisdom, humor and unflinching honesty
that is so musical as to be as fierce and frightening as any punk
ballad, yet as powerful as the lean, fine-sharpened lyrics offered by
Sharon Olds and Eudora Welty. MS, Sparks is singular, an outsider who
offers far more than she receives, she instructs by trying to
understand, and This Dress is an album for all of us no matter who we
are or where we come from, the walk of life is offered here, step by
step with roughshod grace a twinkle in the eye, and the passing of
another day. Brilliant. -- Thom Jurek