Scottie Sparks
Scottie Sparks is a guitarist and lead singer who sang on Doobie Shea’s Stanley Brothers tribute albums of the 1990s, made a solo album for the label in 1999, and then played rhythm guitar with Dave Evans and with Lost and Found, the Virginia band led by Allen Mills.
He had worked as a sideman since he was fifteen. In the mid-1990s he was among the singers Tim Austin gathered at Doobie Shea Studios in Ferrum, Virginia, for The Stanley Tradition: Tribute to a Bluegrass Legacy (1996), backed by Austin, Craig Smith, Dan Tyminski, Aubrey Haynie and Barry Bales. Sparks sang lead on “I’m Better Off Now That You Are Gone,” with Don Rigsby on tenor, and on “Your Selfish Heart,” and took the second verse of “The Only Way to Say Goodbye,” which Ernie Thacker, Ronnie Bowman, Charlie Sizemore, Rigsby and Tyminski also shared. He sang on the follow-up, The Stanley Gospel Tradition (1998).
His own album, Scottie Sparks, came out on Doobie Shea on 7 September 1999, when he was a member of Unlimited Tradition. Haynie, Smith and Tyminski played on it, and the songs included “Train,” “Old Railroad Track,” “Little Willie,” “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” “The Old 109,” “Midnight Storm” and “Highway of Regret.”
On Dave Evans’s Hang Out a Light for Me (Rebel, January 2002), recorded at River Tracks Studio in Louisa, Kentucky, Sparks played rhythm guitar beside Evans’s banjo, Rigsby’s mandolin, Hunter Berry’s fiddle and Mike Bub’s bass; he sang lead on two songs and tenor or high baritone on others. Later that year he was on Lost and Found’s It’s About Time (Rebel, October 2002), sharing the guitar with Barry Berrier alongside Ronald Smith on banjo, Dempsey Young on mandolin and Mills on bass. He was still in the band in 2009, singing lead and playing guitar with Mills, Smith and the mandolinist Scott Napier on Love, Lost and Found (Rebel), where he sings “Letter Stained in Blue” and the tenor on “If Today Was the Last Day.” An earlier recording of Dolly Parton’s “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” with Sparks on guitar and lead vocal and Young on mandolin, closes the band’s last album, Final Chapter (Mountain Fever, 2023).
