Name: November Fiddler's Green Coffeehouse
Start: 2025-11-15T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 470 Candler Park Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA, United States, Georgia 30307

Perennial Fiddler’s Green favorites Sparky and Rhonda Rucker perform throughout the U.S. as well as overseas, singing songs and telling stories from the American folk tradition. They are internationally recognized as leading musicians, authors, and storytellers. They accompany themselves with fingerstyle picking and bottleneck blues guitar, blues harmonica, old-time banjo, piano, spoons, and bones.
James “Sparky” Rucker is a 2025 winner of the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Governor’s Arts Award in the Folklife Heritage category. “For half a century, Rucker has been preserving and sharing African American and Appalachian folk culture with an unwavering commitment to education, social justice, and community. Rucker performs with his wife, Rhonda Rucker, and they now reach thousands of children each year as they travel across the country and give educational performances in schools and colleges.”
Sparky and Rhonda are sure to deliver an uplifting presentation of toe-tapping music spiced with humor, history, and tall tales. They take their audience on an educational and emotional journey that ranges from poignant stories of slavery and war to an amusing rendition of a Brer Rabbit tale or their witty commentaries on current events. Their music includes a variety of old-time blues, Appalachian music, slave songs, Civil War music, spirituals, work songs, ballads, civil rights music, and their own original Compositions.
You will hear soulful blues licks, heart-rending gospel, knee-slapping good rhythms, and bottleneck guitar slide. Over fifty years of performing, Sparky and Rhonda have performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as well as NPR’s All Things Considered, Prairie Home Companion, Mountain Stage, and Morning Edition. Their recording Treasures & Tears was nominated for a W.C. Handy Award, and their music is also included on the Grammy-nominated anthology Singing Through the Hard Times.