The Kentuck Festival of the Arts is being welcomed back to Tuscaloosa's Snow Hinton Park for the second year. With all of the festivities, a front man who's found a profound new meaning and unexpected power in the historic American hymns stands ready to share music with the Druid City.
The annual celebration of creativity and community has a rich history in Alabama. The upcoming festivities, taking place on Oct. 11-12 at Snow Hinton Park in Tuscaloosa, will mark the 54th anniversary of the event. The festival is organized by the Kentuck Art Center, a nonprofit organization that provides creative enrichment to their community through art markets, galleries, and workshops.
Continuing the tradition, the music lineup for 2025 will feature a curated selection of powerhouse performers — including an ensemble that's dedicated to revealing the profound, hidden power and spiritual history embedded in the melodies of America’s oldest hymns, hollers and spirituals.
Walter Parks and The Unlawful Assembly
Here enters Walter Parks & The Unlawful Assembly: the band’s core trio consists of lead singer and guitarist Walter Parks, vocalist Ada Dyer and drummer Steven Williams. They'll take to the Brother Ben Music Stage on Saturday, Oct. 11 from 3:45 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Parks, the band’s front man, is a storyteller, musician, writer and researcher from Jacksonville, Florida. Recognized and archived by the Library of Congress, his projects exist at the intersection of historical research and genre experimentation.
“The Unlawful Assembly is a musical group that’s based around a project of taking old spirituals, American historic spirituals, old historic hymns and reels and hollers and reimagining them for the current times... We might just use electric guitars, or we might arrange them with modern concepts,” he explained.
Parks views their performances as not just entertaining, but educational, using stories to contextualize the historical roots of the music. After his father passed away, being asked to sing hymns like "Amazing Grace" at the memorial gave the songs a profound new meaning and power.
"The sense of importance, and the sense of sadness or gladness, that was written into these songs made an entrance into my psyche because of the of the importance of that event of singing them at my father's memorial," he recalled.
This journey led him to study how church organs can to translate that spiritual music onto the electric guitar, finding that this conversion stripped the hymns down to a "soul and an earthiness and a grit" that connected them directly to the roots of rock and roll.
"When I translate an old hymn to the guitar, an old hymn that we all are used to hearing being played on a church organ... all of a sudden sounds like Pete Townsend of the Who or something," Parks explained. "The power of the melody and the power of the original intention of the songs carries forth, regardless of the lyrics."
Parks' unique approach to music directly influences the sound of The Unlawful Assembly through their contemporary interpretations of music from the past.
The significance of Alabama
Before forming his own band, Parks spent a decade of his career touring the world with singer, songwriter, performer and artist Richie Havens, the first musician to perform at the original Woodstock Festival in 1969.
“I started playing with Richie in 2001. Richie was iconic. He was respected by musicians all over the world... We played Glastonbury Festival. We played Carnegie Hall. We played Madison Square Garden a couple of times, and on one of our tour stops, we came to the Bama Theatre in Tuscaloosa,” he recounted.
After the retirement of Richie Havens, Parks credited the development of his solo career to his experiences in Tuscaloosa and a partnership with David Allgood, former manager of Bama Theatre.
“There's so much that Alabama gave to the music that I grew up on... I wanted to continue my relationship with Tuscaloosa," said Parks. "I called David up, and he said, ‘We'll have you. You're not as well-known as Richie was in the two times you played in the main theater, but we'd like to have you in our lobby concert series.’ So, I came through Tuscaloosa and must have played there four or five times on my own as a solo artist."
As for the musical selections that he chooses to perform, Parks said he draws inspiration from the cultural and historical landscape of Alabama.
“We also do songs that are not just from hymns, but they might have come from the Civil Rights era... It deserves a particular reverence for musicians, because this is where the sentiment behind so much of this great music was connected with the world stage—through civil disobedience, like the Selma and Montgomery marches,” he explained.
To expand on Selma’s significance to Parks’ journey as musician, he said that the namesake of The Unlawful Assembly was found during a solitary trip to the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“This bridge [was] built a long time ago, and you could just feel that something important happened there. I happened to know the history of it, and I thought to myself, ‘On what grounds were these folks arrested when they marched over this bridge?’" he recounted.
"Suffice it to say that the folks were essentially protesting the denial of their right to vote. They gathered together, marched over that bridge, and they were arrested on the grounds of unlawful assembly. […] I had a chill, and I said, ‘That has to be the name of this project.’ And so, I had to pay respect, in a dark sense, but a sense of gratitude to the state of Alabama for naming our band."
The return to Kentuck Festival of the Arts
Parks said he feels humbled to return to the symbolic roots of The Unlawful Assembly by performing at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts for the second time in his career.
“I referred to playing at Kentuck as playing in a revival tent. It has this old South feel to it. As a musician from the outside who’s toured the world and comes into that environment, there's a sort of honor and something that you have to live up to," he explained.
"In that sense, when you play in one of those tents, you realize this is where this kind of music started in the early days... You feel like you're stepping back in time in a certain way and giving a particular reverence to when this music crossed over as entertainment."
Walter Parks and The Unlawful Assembly will grace the Brother Ben Music Stage on Saturday, Oct. at from 3:45 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. for the 54th Kentuck Arts Festival in Tuscaloosa.
More about Kentuck Art Center & Festival
Located in Northport, the main campus of the Kentuck Art Center is home to eight artist studios, three gallery spaces, three classrooms and other art-related spaces. In addition to providing a fun event for the community, the funds raised by the Kentuck Festival of the Arts directly support the art center’s yearly programming.
Since it was first established, the festival has achieved both local and international acclaim. Some of the event’s accolades include being named a top ten event by the Alabama Department of Tourism and being featured in reputable magazines like The Smithsonian, Southern Living and National Geographic Traveler.
In 2024, Kentuck partnered with the city of Tuscaloosa to host the festival in Snow Hinton Park for the first time. The new location provided ten acres of space to accommodate the growing crowd size. It featured more than 270 artists, live music, poetry and other activities.
In addition to the performance from Walter Parks and The Unlawful Assembly, festival goers can expect a variety of other fun activities during the two-day event, including other live performances, artwork, spoken word and much more. Ticket information can be found here: https://www.kentuck.org/festival-tickets
Keep up with Walter Parks:
- Website
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Keep up with the The Unlawful Assembly:
- Website
- Facebook
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