Sparks gave folk a big choral sound

Randy Sparks, a folk music maestro who crafted choral odes, ballads and ditties of droll wit such as “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” during the 1960s folk revival and who nurtured a host of future stars including Kenny Rogers and John Denver, died Feb. 11 in San Diego. He was 90.

Mr. Sparks had health problems including heart trouble, said his son, Cameron Sparks. Mr. Sparks, who lived in Mokelumne Hill, Calif., was under medical care at his son’s home.

Amid the range of folk and roots music that flourished before the rock revolution — from the activist strains of Pete Seeger to the pop-style sound of the Kingston Trio — Mr. Sparks flexed his versatility. He defied easy labeling as a songwriter and leader of troupes including the New Christy Minstrels and the Back Porch Majority.

Those groups became Mr. Sparks’s laboratory for his Americana songbook that was deeply influenced by the storytelling lyricism and harmonic mixes of his idol, Burl Ives. The revolving makeup of Mr. Sparks’s ensembles also was a steppingstone for some star-studded alumni including country great Rogers, singer-songwriter Kim Carnes and Gene Clark, a founding member of the folkrock band the Byrds. A longtime member, Barry McGuire, known for his version of the 1965 antiwar anthem “Eve of Destruction” written by P.F. Sloan.

Mr. Sparks came across another young singer in the 1960s by the name of Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., who Mr. Sparks let stay rent-free an apartment above his garage in Los Angeles and, according to Mr. Sparks, persuaded him to change his name to John Denver — although Denver long asserted his name was an homage to his love for the Rocky Mountains.

“That is absolutely false,” Mr. Sparks wrote in a letter to the Sacramento PBS station KVIE in 2006. “How do I know? I was there.”

Mr. Sparks helped bring a new dimension to modern folk music by literally thinking big. In the late 1950s, he was still pursuing a combo career as songwriter and actor. He had missed out on a part in “Thunder Road,” a 1958 film starring Robert Mitchum as a Tennessee moonshine runner. But Mr. Sparks sang the movie’s opening song, which he co-wrote with Mitchum.

Then in 1960, while in Vancouver doing a folk club gig, Mr. Sparks came across a biography of the 19th century American song-weaver Stephen Foster, whose works such as “Oh! Susanna” and “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair” where made popular by a band known as Christy’s Minstrels after their leader, composer and actor Edwin P. Christy. (Christy was later regarded as notorious for his use of blackface singers.)