The Bigger Picture

Great Things and Dangerous Stuff

by Nathan Salsburg

”It’s amazing that Nimrod learned and retained these songs, that he can compose on the spot, that he survived 40 years of mining life and many more years than that of tobacco and alcohol use, and that he remains at the age of 92 vital and able to talk and sing with strong conviction. He is a treasure.” — Mike Seeger, 1987

The first release on the Twos & Fews label is I Want to Go Where Things are Beautiful, a collection from coal miner, union activist and singer Nimrod Workman. It’s based on 1982 recordings of Workman by folklorist and musician Mike Seeger, and it marks Workman's first release in 30 years. I first discovered Nimrod while digging through Lomax’s record collection in 2000. I came across a 45 that featured what have become (if anything can be so called) Workman’s most famous compositions, “42 Years” and “Coal Black Mining Blues.” The cover portrait of the man, his face stricken with deep rivulets, like a parched and lonesome scrubland, attested to his many years spent underground and along the picket line, and was a visual correlative to his eerie, bristling songs. Those songs floored me. I had never heard anything as starkly intimate and honest, bearing not a trace of romanticism, born of decades of personal experience and hardship. I’m not indulging in hyperbole when I say that they scared me, and made me chilly and uncomfortable. But though they might have slightly repelled me, I was deeply moved, and with each listen they didn’t soften, but I began to feel their inherent warmth.

I listened that 45 into the ground, and eBayed for more, winning easily (as the only bidder) copies of Nimrod’s 1978 Rounder LP Mother Jones’ Will and his Passing Through the Garden, a record he made in 1974 with his daughter Phyllis Boyens (now Boyens-Liptak) for Appalshop’s June Appal label. They lightened my impression of Nimrod a bit, with their inclusions of the tongue-twisters and nonsense songs that Nimrod obviously loved to sing. By that time I had become friends with some of the Appalshop crew, and they passed on a VHS of To Fit My Own Category, a beautiful, if spare, portrait of Nimrod as singer, ginsenger, and father. Then I spent time with Lomax’s raw footage of Nimrod, shot in 1983 at Nim’s home in Mascot, Tennessee, near Knoxville. Portions of that footage appeared in Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old, one of the six films produced for Lomax’s American Patchwork PBS series. To watch Workman ease his way one moment through his seven-minute “Lord Bateman” (which he called “Baseman”), accompanied by his elaborate and unique hand gestures, then drop to the floor to show off his spider walk the next, was a happy thrill. The fearfulness with which I heard his most mournful performances and beheld his visage was replaced by intense respect and affection. He had survived brutal social and occupational conditions without sacrificing his pride, his anger, or his allegiance to the good fights for equality and justice. But nor did he surrender his childlike mischievousness and his obvious love of hilarity and the absurd.