“New Highway” is a gospel song that Larry Sparks has recorded more than once. His 2005 Rebel recording credits it to Homer Jackson. Sparks first cut it in 1997 at the Horizon Music Group studio in Arden, North Carolina, as the opening and title track of New Highway, which Mountain Home issued in 1998. Sparks sang lead and played guitar, with John R. Bowman on second guitar, Scott Napier on mandolin, David Johnson on fiddle and dobro and Tim Surrett on bass.
He recorded it again in 2004 at Tom T. and Dixie Hall’s studio in Franklin, Tennessee, for 40 (Rebel, 2005). That version strips the band down to David Harvey’s mandolin and Larry D. Sparks’s bass, and Sparks sings the lead, tenor and baritone parts himself. The song appears again on his 2019 Rebel album New Moon Over My Shoulder.
Most of the lyric is a portrait of a man without schooling who still knew more about life than anyone. He never trained as a carpenter, yet what he built stands up to every storm. He was no scientist and held no doctor’s degree, yet he can take out a heart of stone and set a new one in its place, working from the inside out and leaving no scar. Only in the last verse is he named as Jesus. The chorus gives the title its meaning: he built a new highway to heaven that few will travel and put the singer on it, a road with no detour signs where no one travels alone.
