The New Christy Minstrels

The New Christy Minstrels are an American large-ensemble folk music group founded by Randy Sparks in 1961. The group has recorded more than 20 albums and scored several hits, including "Green, Green", "Saturday Night", "Today", "Denver" and "This Land Is Your Land". The group's 1962 debut album, Presenting the New Christy Minstrels, won a Grammy Award and remained on the Billboard 200 albums chart for two years. The group sold millions of records, was in demand at concerts and on television shows and helped launch the musical careers of several musicians, including Kenny Rogers, Gene Clark, Kim Carnes, Larry Ramos and Barry McGuire. Founding Randy Sparks had been a solo performer, mixing folk music with pop standards and playing club dates on the West Coast and in Manhattan. Twice the winner of a Navy talent competition, he landed high-profile television appearances and a recording contract with Verve Records. 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 lacked the rustic character of actual folk performance. Throughout 1961 and 1962, he created a 14-voice ensemble, the New Christy Minstrels, by combining his trio with the Oregon quartet the Fairmount Singers, the Inn Group (singers John Forsha, Karol Dugan and Jerry Yester), banjo player Billy Cudmore, folk-blues singer Terry Wadsworth, folk singer Dolan Ellis and singer/guitarist Art Podell. Large commercial folk groups did not yet exist, and the New Christy Minstrels delivered a robust new sound. Sparks named his group after Christy's Minstrels, a blackface group formed by Philadelphia-born showman Edwin Pearce Christy in 1842 and known for introducing Stephen Foster's compositions. Sparks also saw his group as a means of attracting attention to his own original songs and adaptations of folk classics.