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Randy Sparks, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and founder of the folk music group the New Christy Minstrels, died Feb. 11 at an assisted-living facility in San Diego. He was 90. His son ...
Sparks starred in the 1960 film drama The Big Night. Sparks also wrote "Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio", which was recorded and made famous by John Denver. Sparks composed the musical score for the 1964 movie Advance to the Rear, a Civil War spoof. The love song "Today" ("while the blossoms still cling to the vine") was part of that score.
In 1971, Randy Sparks re-formed The Back Porch Majority and toured under the name "Randy Sparks and the Back Porch Majority" through 1979. Sparks and the BPM performed frequently with Burl Ives and Shirley Jones, acting as opening act and back-up band. The group was featured performing the title song to the Disney film, The Apple Dumpling Gang ...
Jergens was married to actor Peter Brown between 1958 and 1960. [2] [10]In 1962, she wed musician and songwriter Randy Sparks. [11] They had four children, Kevin Ray Sparks, Melinda Anne Sparks and Cameron Michael Sparks (twins), and Amanda Hamilton Sparks. [12]
In 1960, at the suggestion of Verve founder Norman Granz, Sparks formed the Randy Sparks Three with his wife, Jackie Miller, and singer/arranger Nick Woods. Folk music was popular, and choral groups such as the Norman Luboff Choir were incorporating folk classics in their repertoires. Sparks felt that the seemingly perfect sound of such groups ...
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The way banjo player Rick Sparks remembers it, Brooks first tested “Grandma” in Italy, of all places, with the band on a USO tour of military bases. ... “They wanted one more song, and Randy ...
Randy Sparks directed and arranged the music and wrote four of the songs. The 14 tracks on Presenting the New Christy Minstrels are mostly traditional songs or covers of songs by other artists. Much of the material on the album would later become "synonymous with the early-'60s youth-driven folk movement."