KEENE, N.H. (MyKeeneNow) When Walter Parks talks about music, he talks about mud.

Not metaphorical mud, but the blackwater marshes and cypress knees of the Okefenokee Swamp, where he camped as a Boy Scout and first wondered what songs might have echoed through the trees generations before him.

“Wherever I’m playing — whether it’s an opera house in Europe or a roadhouse down South — I’m carrying that swamp with me,” Parks said.

On Friday, Feb. 27, Parks brings that landscape — and the music it inspired — to the SHOWROOM for a performance with his band, The Unlawful Assembly.

For Keith Marks, executive director of The Colonial and SHOWROOM, the booking is personal.

“This is one of the shows I dreamed of bringing here,” Marks said. “Walter’s performance is a journey through Southern roots music — you hear the interaction between African American and European histories. It’s entertaining, but it’s also illuminating.”

A Project Years In The Making

Parks began digging deeply into the music of the Okefenokee in 2012. Five years later, in 2017, The Unlawful Assembly formally took shape — a group dedicated to reimagining spirituals, hollers, hymns and reels rooted in the American South.

In August 2020, the Library of Congress invited Parks to archive his research and perform his arrangements of songs created by homesteaders in southeast Georgia’s swamp region. The work — including field recordings Parks created of stomp rhythms captured in an old log cabin — is now part of the American Folklife Collection.

At the heart of the project is a question Parks asked himself years earlier: How do you take folk music recorded in the 1940s and make it resonate now?

“I just started listening and asking what I could do to translate it to my guitar — and make it meaningful and entertaining for a modern audience,” said Parks in a recent interview with My Keene Now from his St. Louis home. “I’m always trying to avoid the stereotypical approach. That’s how you give old work new life.”

In performance, The Unlawful Assembly blends old-school spirituals, gospel, blues and prison work chants with shaped-note hymns, swamp hollers and Appalachian reels. The result is less a history lesson than a living soundtrack — rhythmic, layered and emotionally direct.

Joining Parks are drummer and producer Steven Williams, vocalist Ada Dyer — known for her work with Bruce Springsteen — and percussionist Andrae Murchison. Parks describes Dyer’s voice as “like being cradled by the answers you want to hear.”

From Sideman To Storyteller

For a decade, Parks toured internationally as the guitarist for Woodstock legend Richie Havens, performing at Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and festivals from Glastonbury to Australia. In 2014, he was Judy Collins’ sole accompanist during her Lincoln Center tribute to Pete Seeger.

Yet even during those high-profile years, Parks found himself pulled back toward his own origins.

After Havens retired and later died, Parks leaned fully into his research and songwriting. He formed Swamp Cabbage, an electric folk-rock trio, and deepened the work that would become The Unlawful Assembly.

The material carries weight. Many of the songs emerge from the African American experience — spirituals shaped by slavery and prison labor. As a white musician raised in the South, Parks said he initially hesitated.

“It felt like trespassing,” he said.

Encouragement came from collaborators and audiences alike. On early tours, he said, older Black audience members approached him with a surprising message: the songs were important — and important to hear performed across cultural lines.

That affirmation, along with conversations in African Methodist Episcopal churches and performances at historically Black colleges and universities, shaped his approach. He emphasizes research, respect and context as essential parts of the work.

“I see it as trying to understand where this music came from,” he said. “That’s a patriotic act in its own way — to appreciate the soundtrack to the making of this country.”

Music As Common Ground

Though Parks steers clear of overt political commentary onstage, he does speak about listening — truly listening — across differences.

“It takes work to understand what’s happening on the other side of the tracks,” he said. “When you feel your blood start to boil, that’s when you have to step back and listen.”

He believes American roots music — born from both hardship and hope — offers a rare shared space.

“Sure, some of it came from toil, from things we’d rather not remember,” he said. “But it also came from love, and from the desire for redemption.”

At a Unlawful Assembly show, that philosophy isn’t delivered as a lecture. It’s carried in harmony — male and female voices intertwined — and in rhythm strong enough to make a room move.

“We’ve got a beat, we’ve got harmony,” Parks said with a laugh. “What else do you need?”

For Keene audiences, the answer may lie somewhere between a swamp and a stage — in songs that traveled through time and found new life.

If You Go: Walter Parks and The Unlawful Assembly perform Friday, Feb. 27, at 7:30 p.m. at the SHOWROOM, 20 Commercial St., Keene. Tickets are available online and at the box office. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.showroomkeene.org or call the box office at 352-2033.