Metro Pulse/Gamut/Sparky Rucker

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Bluesman, activist and biographer, Sparky Rucker keeps on moving

by Jack Neely

When his fans in Germany or Idaho or many other parts of the world see him on a poster, they see a tough-looking, gray-bearded black man in work clothes and a broad-brimmed hat. They may not see Sparky Rucker, the Knoxville policeman's son who grew up watching Jimmy Durante on television and went to college to study zoology.

Or Sparky Rucker, the '60s political activist in dark shades and Afro who once served as a grim bodyguard for Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.

Or Sparky Rucker, the biographer of a young Confederate general killed in action at Murfreesboro.

Sparky Rucker's hard to nail down, in personality and in person. If you catch him, it's always between far-flung gigs. Since his son was born, he has pared down his tours from about 70,000 miles a year to about 18,000 miles a year, all of which he drives in his '92 Plymouth Voyager, which has already logged more than a quarter of a million miles.

Late this month, on March 30, he'll pull it into the parking lot of the Laurel Theatre for a relatively rare performance in his hometown.

At 54, he spends his non-traveling time in Maryville with his wife, Rhonda, and eight-year-old son, Jamie. We nailed him down recently at Los Amigos, the Mexican restaurant in Maryville. When he's home, he doesn't like to stray far.

He's a big guy, well over six feet in his trademark cowboy boots and he's not skinny. But he's no thug. If your overcoat lapel's crooked, he'll reach over and straighten it for you, then apologize, saying it's the daddy in him.

He's brought a thick paperback, to while away the time in case he got here first. It's not a Bible or a Farmer's Almanac. It's a novel set in colonial India, circa 1803, Bernard Cornell's Sharpe's Temple.

Rucker is a man of many hats, literally and figuratively. But you can count on the fact that he's always wearing a hat of some sort. Today it's a broad-brimmed cloth slouch chapeau. On his left ear he also wears a pendant ear cuff of carved bone, which he bought at a pow-wow in Wisconsin. It dances when he laughs, which is often.

Though he once dressed like a field hand and sang country blues, Rucker grew up in the city. Some cynics make fun of college-educated "folk musicians," and Sparky Rucker would fit that category. In his case, however, he's a folk musician who graduated from college only after he spent part of his childhood in the projects near Knoxville College ("We didn't know it was the ghetto," he says) in a still-segregated Southern city.

His name is James, but when he was only six days old, his Aunt Ruth, remarking about the twinkle in the baby's eyes, called him "Sparky." He likes the nickname, and says it has served him well as a blues musician.

He was different from many kids in the "ghetto," though, because his parents stayed together, and his dad had a good job. J.D. Rucker was a policeman. By the time Sparky was a teenager, the Ruckers owned their own home, a nice place on Brooks Road in East Knoxville. "I grew up in a Father Knows Best life," he confesses.

The only blues Sparky Rucker knew as a boy were his dad's uniformed colleagues on the police force.

Sparky's sister had a blues 78 in the house only until their mother found out about it. Most of the music he heard was black gospel music, in the Boyd Street Church of God. His grandfather had been pastor at another Church of God, on Patton Street, where retired blues legend Ida Cox sang in the choir, but Sparky didn't know her personally. "Because my family was so prominent in the church," he says, "the only music we'd hear on the radio was gospel." But on the radio late on Sunday nights, after Billy Graham, Sparky sometimes caught a stray bluish song by the Swan Silvertones or the Five Blind Boys on a black-music show.

In short, when Sparky got his first guitar, at 11, he didn't have a blues heritage. It was 1957, and he wanted to play rock 'n' roll. He got a band together as a teenager and he sang lead and played rhythm guitar to Chuck Berry and early James Brown covers, sometimes at Freddy Logan's nightclub on Vine, where they sometimes got as much as $25 (to split four ways). He didn't have a strong political or educational motivation: as he explains, "We got the little girls to go eee!"

He first encountered the blues at the Highlander Folk School, where his cousin was involved in the center's civil-rights efforts. When Rucker was a teenager in the early '60s, Highlander was located on Riverside Drive in East Knoxville, not far from downtown and walking distance from his own home. Highlander was, quietly, a nerve center for much of the civil-rights activity across the South, and they did much of it with music—country, blues, and folk. The song "We Shall Overcome" originated as a protest song at Highlander. For Rucker, it was an exciting neighbor to have.

About the same time, he was developing a political consciousness.

"I was a good kid," he says. "I didn't get in trouble." He remembers when his parents quit going to the Bijou Theater because they tired of its strict segregation. "They'd make you sit in the balcony," he recalls, then laughs. "Tell me the rationale of discriminating against people, and then putting them above you in a dark room? I always bought two bags of popcorn. One to eat, and one to throw down at the white people." The Ruckers began to favor the predominantly black Gem Theater, on Vine.

Rucker attended all-black Austin High and remembers himself as a studious nerd. "I was very shy in high school," he says. "I hung around with the other nerdy people, the people who wanted to be scientists. The guys with the pocket protectors." He was no troublemaker, but he says distrust of the white race was nearly universal.

He remembers studying MacBeth in 12th grade in November 1963, when the class was interrupted with news that Kennedy had been assassinated. In the midst of Shakespeare's play about treachery and assassination, Rucker assumed Kennedy—who had seemed a friend to Southern blacks—was the victim of white supremacists. "When he was gunned down in Dallas, it was a slap in the face to us," he says. "A lot of black folks felt that way."

He recalls that moment as the beginning of his political consciousness. "Because Kennedy was assassinated, I decided I'd have to fight for myself." A few months later, he was joining the gathering resistance. When Knoxville earned the designation "All-American City" in 1963, it angered many blacks who didn't think their still-segregated hometown deserved the honor. Rucker found himself joining a demonstration at the Civic Coliseum a few weeks later. He arrived too late for the main part of the demonstration, but went to the jail to check on some of his friends who'd been arrested. When he didn't come home right away, his policeman father went out looking for him. "He said, 'I bet some of these crackers have killed my boy.'"

Through Highlander, Rucker became involved in civil-rights projects, as well as musical ones, including the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project. At their old Riverside Drive address, he also learned some musical styles, including blues. "I was one of the earliest blues players I heard," he says.

He began to tour with the folk-revival show, and got to meet a remarkable array of fellow folkies, from college coffee-house hero Pete Seeger to backwoods Kentuckian Dock Boggs, whose 1920s recordings are legendary among country and blues historians. "He'd down a pint of whiskey before he went on," Rucker says. "And not a sorry note."

At UT, Rucker became part of the tiny black minority in the first generation of black students at a university that had been all white until 1960. "If it hadn't been for the beatniks and the artists," he says, "I would have felt out of place at UT."

Originally he was a zoology major. "I wanted to be a zoologist," he says, "until I realized how boring those people are." He switched to fine arts and was known for a time as a painter. As if to prove this little-known alley of his career, he shows a photo of himself with a large canvas, an impressive post-impressionist piece later stolen.

He became poetry editor of the Phoenix, and performed in a rock band called Liquid. Their motto was, "When we're hot, we're a gas. But when we're cold, we're solid." They played around town, at nightclubs and the few coffee shops on campus, including the one at the Presbyterian Student Union, which became, surprisingly, a gathering place for aspiring radicals.

"Stokely Carmichael was coming to speak, and he liked to have four tall men stand in front of him in afros and sunglasses. They were short one, who was sick." Rucker was a sizable guy, and filled in. He later found out the guy he replaced was H. Rap Brown.

On a folkie trip to Nashville, he met poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and an old friend from Knoxville named Nikki Giovanni, just then becoming one of the leading poets of the black power movement. When he traveled, he never made prior arrangements. "I just knew somebody's gonna feed me, somebody's gonna put me up."

"It was a great time to be young," Rucker says. "I feel so God-blessed to have lived in that time."

Through the serendipities of the folk/beatnik circuits, before he was 25 Rucker had gotten to know several legends of Civil Rights politics, folk music, and poetry, most of them without leaving Tennessee.

He was drafted five times, but got out of it, he thinks, thanks to Congressman John Duncan, Sr., who was a friend of his father's.

When popular folk singer Phil Ochs visited UT's campus in the early '70s, Sparky Rucker was the opening act. "He was obviously frightened about being in the South," Rucker says, recalling that Ochs badly wanted a drink after the show. But it was 1971, just before liquor by the drink was re-legalized in Knoxville. Rucker told Ochs that in Knoxville it was much easier to find marijuana than liquor, and he settled for that. "When I heard he killed himself," a few years later, Rucker says, "I wasn't surprised."

Rucker, who bears some resemblance to Brownie McGhee, might easily be mistaken for a protege. Both are from Knoxville, and the country-blues styles of the two guitarists are similar. However, Rucker never met McGhee until the two played together in Edmonton, Canada, in 1973.

"He's good people," Rucker says of McGhee, who died in 1996. "Especially for a famous person." Rucker paid tribute to his fellow Knoxville native on his 1990 CD, Treasures and Tears, with some covers of McGhee songs. That album, recorded with his wife, Rhonda, would be nominated for the W.C. Handy Award for Best Traditional Recording.

A couple of years later, the Ruckers followed it with a different recording: The Blue and Gray In Black And White, a collection of traditional Civil War-era songs.

Though it left some of his old fans scratching their heads at what seemed a strange departure, Rucker's interest in the Civil War evolved out of his blues. To Rucker, they're both historical forms. After all, the blues he's best known for playing were going out of fashion before he was born.

During his tours, Rucker's interest in history often steers his Voyager along historical routes: the Lewis and Clark Trail, the Jesse James Trail, the Buffalo Soldier trail. In Pratt, Kansas, he portrayed a buffalo soldier—a black cavalryman of the late 19th century—at a rodeo, and found it an interesting experience. A representative from the Petersburg Battlefield in Virginia happened to hear about it and invited Rucker to play a Civil War "buffalo soldier." Actually, that term wasn't applied to black soldiers of the Civil War, but Rucker worked his blue buffalo-soldier uniform into that of a Union cavalryman. He began touring with his new show, singing the songs of the war, like "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

His timing was perfect; it was just a few months before Ken Burns' Civil War documentary, the most popular public television show in history. Rucker was already there, and schools and Civil War groups eager to get a different perspective on the war called him.

Though he tells the story from the point of view of a Union soldier, he also sings "Dixie." He has old friends who still don't get that part.

"It's a great song, a beautiful song," he says. "I never tell it without telling the story of the Snowdens." That story, credited by some historians, is that the minstrel tune "Dixie's Land," popular in the 1850s, was written by members of a free black family named Snowden who moved north to Ohio.

"Slavery was the issue" of the Civil War, he says. "I don't think you can deny that. It's all through the papers. If you think slavery wasn't the issue, you're not paying attention to what your own ancestors are telling you." Still, he says, some of the symbols of the South were powerful ones. "I'm just saying I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water."

He also acknowledges the heroism of some Confederate soldiers. He is, in fact, hard at work on a biography of Gen. James Edward Rains, C.S.A., killed in action at Murfreesboro. The sometime artist, zoology student, and bluesman now seems inspired to contemplate a new career as "one of the up-and-coming Civil War historians."

He's fond of the South, and comfortable here. Rhonda, his wife and sometime co-star since the '80s, is white, a fact that might have prompted trouble in the Knoxville area only a generation or two ago. "My wife and I, we've not had a speck of trouble. But in Boston, I've had trouble by myself. In Chicago, I've had trouble." He adds that Idaho is like Tennessee 50 years ago.

Though he says Tennessee is still struggling with race issues, he says, "We've dealt with it. That's why the South is more livable than the North. I feel comfortable here."

Tennessee has no shortage of knee-jerk reactionaries, he admits, but adds, "I know these people. These are my rednecks. You don't pick on them."

And if Sparky Rucker's in the room, you don't.