What follows are notes written for “I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful,” an album (CD & LP) devoted to the coal miner, union activist, and singer Nimrod Workman. It’s the first solo CD (however posthumous) of the late Workman, and his first LP in 30 years; it’s also the first release on Twos & Fews, an imprint I’m curating in conjunction with the Drag City label in Chicago.

I’m really excited to be starting with this record of Mike Seeger’s recordings of Workman. I first discovered Nimrod while digging through Lomax’s record collection in 2000, where I found a 45 released on an Appalshop-related imprint called Dillon’s Run, and which featured what have become – if anything can be so-called – Workman’s most famous compositions; namely, “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 as they were 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, they were deeply moving, and with each listen they didn’t necessarily soften up, but I began to ken their inherent warmth.

I listened to that 45 into the ground, and turned to eBay for more, winning as the only bidder copies of Nimrod’s 1978 Rounder LP “Mother Jones’ Will” and his “Passing Through the Garden,” a record he made with his daughter Phyllis Boyens (now Boyens-Liptak) for Appalshop’s newly launched June Appal label (1974). 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, which is a beautiful, if spare, portrait of Nimrod as singer, ginsenger, and father. And then I spent time with Lomax’s raw footage of Nimrod, shot in 1982 (just weeks after Mike Seeger made his first recordings) at Nim’s home in Mascot, Tennessee, near Knoxville. Portions of that footage appeared in Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old and Appalachian Journey, two of the six films produced for Lomax’s American Patchwork PBS series, and 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, to 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.

Nimrod, c. 1980s. Courtesy Phyllis Boyens-Liptak.

This is all to say that it’s an absolute honor to have worked on this record, in the hope of bringing Nimrod Workman to more willing and sympathetic ears. He’s not an easy listen. My father, for one, tells me Workman’s singing literally inflicts pain to him. But I’ve found him to be one of the most satisfying traditional singers ever recorded, as his performances are near to bursting with humanity and honesty. Several of his granddaughters have written on the Twos & Fews Myspace page short but loving tributes to their Paw-paw, making me all the more sorry that I never knew him while he lived. I would have loved to have sat on the porch “visiting,” as Mike Seeger writes fondly of doing, while Nimrod sang and joked and told his stories. Doing this record is the closest I’ll get to him; and it’s been time well spent. I hope you’ll spend some of your own, and that you’ll come to agree.

* * *

Nimrod Workman was born near Inez in Eastern Kentucky in 1895, into a family that boasted frontiersmen, panther-killers, Civil War veterans both blue and gray, and a great Cherokee warrior as forebears. His family’s subsistence farming in the coves and hollers of Martin County made for no easy way of life, but it soon gave way to one even tougher, as the coal industry moved into the mountains. At the age of 14, like many of his generation, Workman went to work in the mines. He moved to nearby Chattaroy, in Mingo County, West Virginia, where he’d live and work in various mining capacities for, as his composition tells it, “42 Years,” when black lung and a slipped disc forced him into retirement.

Nimrod told Alan Lomax in 1983 that “I been though some great things and some dangerous stuff.” In the wake of the Matewan Massacre of 1921, he marched with hundreds of fellow miners (and, he claimed, Mother Jones too, though this has never been proven*) into neighboring Logan County and what became the Battle of Blair Mountain in an effort to organize the coal fields. Although martial law was declared and the union drive stalled, the experience confirmed his life-long commitment to the UMWA and the Democratic Party. Forty years later, he was part of a contingent of West Virginia miners that visited the nation’s capitol to lobby Senator Robert Byrd for black lung compensation, which they ultimately received.

But, as Mike Seeger wrote in a 1987 report to the NEA, which had given him a Folk Arts grant to make the recordings on this album, singing was “at the center of Nimrod Workman’s life…. When I first visited him in the early ’70s, he sang nearly our entire visit, not necessarily to perform but as an important part of his relating to people.” His upbringing was steeped in lyric songs, comic play-party pieces, dance tunes, hymns and sacred material from the Baptist church, and the mournful Scots-Irish ballads that filled the Southern Appalachian mountains. He learned them from his parents, his grandfather, his neighbors (especially Uncle Peter McNeely, who “came over here from England,” “shantied all the time” and would teach only Nimrod the songs in his bag), and he composed them himself. After leaving home for Mingo’s Howard Collieries, as he recalls to Mike Seeger here, he’d sing to keep himself company. “I’d be in there by myself, couldn’t hear nobody nowhere. Just nothing but me and my light, in that dark place. I’d be a’loading my car, and I’d sing till I get it loaded.” Out of this dark place came Workman’s best known compositions, “42 Years,” “Mother Jones’ Will,” and “Coal Black Mining Blues.”

Later in life, when he began touring the folk and heritage festival circuit extensively, Nimrod would add to these fundamental, formative elements in his repertoire others’ topical material (Hazel Dickens, Si Kahn, Jean Ritchie), popular country compositions (Merle Haggard, Norman Blake), and the songs of his wife Molly’s Pentecostal Holiness Church (tracks 1, 5, 24, 25). He discriminated on his own terms — those songs appealed to him on the basis of his traditional background — if he heard a song that he liked, he learned it, sang it, and often claimed it as his own. Seeger addressed this penchant of Nimrod’s in his NEA report: “Nimrod takes songs and personalizes them, puts them into his own style and changes a few words. He takes great artistic liberties with some songs and possibly with the old ballads. I believe that this might also have something to do with his not being literate, having a strong ego and some measure of rascality. There is no doubt that most of his songs are living things, especially melodically and in mode of presentation.”

Appalshop produced a documentary of Nimrod in 1975 called “To Fit My Own Category,” the title of which was drawn from notes appearing in Nimrod’s first LP (“Passing Through the Garden,” June Appal 001, 1974). Rich Kirby quoted Nimrod as saying in reference to one of his compositions: “I made this song to fit my own category.” Deeply religious, joyfully mischievous, fiercely independent, uncompromising but always adaptable, Nimrod was a tradition-bearer who didn’t let tradition dictate the full contours of his remarkable artistry: an artistry in a category entirely its own.

Nimrod Workman died in 1994 at the age of 99. It’s an honor to make these recordings available.

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.

*This caveat did not appear in my notes to the album. Jack Wright, producer of the Music of Coal box-set and of Nimrod’s first recordings, has looked into this and can’t substantiate Nimrod’s claims. I took Nimrod’s telling of the tale at face value – something I should have known better than to do – and for that I’m regretful. What a thrilling image it musters.

October 31: I’ve updated this post to jibe (almost) with the version published in this week’s edition of the Louisville Eccentric Observer. If you’d like to see Catherine Irwin’s striking cover art, have a look at http://www.leoweekly.com/.

It’s the first of July 1929, and at Brunswick Records’ studio in Chicago a recording supervisor invites a banjo-pickin’, tabacker-chawin’, moonshine-swiggin’ hillbilly to sit in front of a microphone (“Mike who?” the yokel asks) and make a record. The hillbilly delivers some canned vernacular (“Well dog my cats!”; “Well that’ll make a black snake spit in a bulldog’s eye!”), threatens the engineer, and gets learnt what a cuspidor is. After the supervisor coaxes a few verses and “some of that old-fashioned banjo picking” out of his guest, who has meanwhile gotten himself drunk, both sides of the record are finished, to be released later that year in the Brunswick/Supertone catalog as “A Mountain Boy Makes His First Record.”

That mountain boy was a 28-year-old from Magoffin County, Kentucky, named Buell Kazee, and this recorded skit was of his own devising: two sides of 58 that he made for the Brunswick label between 1927 and 1929, the heyday of the “hillbilly” recording era. Those sides, however, are among the least representative of the mountain boy’s considerable musical abilities (and did not in fact constitute his first record). And, as Loyal Jones, retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, writes in his notes to the June Appal label’s recently released CD of Kazee’s later recordings, “Buell did not look on them as major accomplishments.”

They are also a completely misleading portrait of the man himself (not that many fell for it; the record hardly sold and has never been reissued), as the June Appal album, Buell Kazee, released in June, makes clear. Kazee was well-educated, deeply religious (he heard the call to preach at 17), and without a doubt one of the most remarkable talents in American folk music. His extensive repertoire of ballads, lyric songs, and occupational pieces reflected an upbringing in a mountain community steeped in the “old songs” and entertained by square dances and bean stringings, where he picked up the banjo at the age of five and where his love of music was nurtured by his parents, both of whom were talented singers.

Kazee’s vocal delivery, however, belied the influence of a sophisticated musical education, and, while for some listeners it placed him in an uncertain territory between authenticity and affectation, it was wholly his own. He had studied voice — in high school; at Georgetown College, where he majored in English, Greek, and Latin; and after graduation in Ashland, Kentucky, with a visiting tenor from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York — and he brought to his material a vocal sensitivity seldom heard applied to old-time music. For many, his “good voice,” as he called it, was at best an occasional distraction and at worst a liability. A Brunswick engineer remarked of it, “That’s fine, but it won’t ring on the cash register.” One of America’s foremost scholars of country music, the late Charles K. Wolfe, wrote in 2003 that “fortunately, only a few of [Kazee’s] recorded selections were seriously marred by his inclination to employ artistic vocal technique.” Indeed, most of Kazee’s recorded output is marked by a subtle synthesis of that technique with the “light throat” he explained was characteristic of mountain singing, and though it might not have been the most “authentic” article, it marked Kazee as an artist of depth, grace, and individuality.

Authentic or not, Buell Kazee’s career as a professional musician came to end in 1929, despite offers of tour support for county fairs across the country and membership in the radio cast of WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago. His priorities were spiritual, not musical. As he is quoted in the June Appal CD: “I couldn’t go that way. My life was cast in a different direction and there wasn’t any reason to consider it…. I was going to preach all my life.”

He got out just in time. The stock market crash of 1929 sent the Brunswick label into bankruptcy, and by 1933 countless banjo pickers, blues singers, jug bands, and old-time combos would be driven back into obscurity by the Depression. Considering the grandiose and metaphor-prone enthusiams of many fans of this era of American music, one might forgive its end being likened to the natural calamity that finished off the dinosaurs. The outcome of the labels’ collapse was that many performers with gigantic repertoires and talents disappeared back into the folds of the fields, hollers, bottomlands, and assorted Southern locales from whence they came and where they returned to jobs more typical of those environments. Many old-time players like Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs went into the mines. Bluesman Mississippi John Hurt farmed as a sharecropper. Others, such as Son House and Blind Willie McTell, like Buell Kazee, entered the ministry (with varying degress of success, professional or spiritual). Still others moved north seeking work, which some found, in industry. Many vanished without a trace.

Over the next forty years, Kazee led congregations in Morehead and Lexington, wrote two books on Christian theology, and taught at Lexington Baptist Bible College. Despite a struggle with depression and an agonizing period of uncertainty about his faith after his wife left him in 1940, he surely would have been content with his religious vocation and to keep any singing of the “old songs” a purely private affair.

But in 1952 the Folkways record company released Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP set reissuing old-time, blues, gospel, and Cajun music from the pre-Depression 78 era. Up to this point most urban listeners had gotten their folk songs secondhand, from songbooks, summer camps, and spit-shined renditions perfomed by the tuxedoed likes of the Weavers. The Anthology was remarkable because it transmitted American folk material democratically, from primary (if commercial) sources, without mediation. It also helped precipitate the period now known as the Folk Revival.

Smith — eccentric, occultist, avant-garde filmmaker, collector of Ukranian Easter eggs, Seminole quilts, and 78 rpm records — compiled his Anthology as a glorification of the “exotic” in American music: an exploration of the metaphysical space writer Greil Marcus termed “The Old Weird America,” an era not even 30 years gone but separated from the early 1950s by a massive gulf of political, cultural, and technological developments. Smith saw the album as a catalyst for social change that, according to Marcus, was to “distinguish those who responded from those who didn’t.” You either got it or you didn’t, and a handful of dissatisfied young people coming of age in Eisenhower’s America really got it. They responded to Smith’s mytho-anthology by identifying with the gamblers, hobos, and murderers inhabiting the songs therein; recreating those songs to the best of their urban teenage abilities; and fantasizing about the vague deities who howled, moaned, and keened them out.

One of those keening voices was Buell Kazee’s. Harry Smith had included three of his sides — “The Butcher Boy,” “East Virginia,” and “The Wagoner’s Lad — and soon Revival performers like the New Lost City Ramblers were trying their hands at them in Washington Square Park, admirably approximating Kazee’s banjo frailings and tunings. But as the Anthology offered only aural hints as to such specifics of the original performances – Smith was more inclined to elevate them to the realm of musical mysticism (the set’s cover bears the hand of God tuning a monochord) — it occurred to some of the young revivalists that perhaps the best way to learn the Anthology’s songs was to seek out their original singers and players and study at the source; some might still be alive!

Thus, in 1957, Gene Bluestein, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, tracked Kazee down in Lexington and recorded a session that Folkways soon released on LP as Buell Kazee Sings and Plays. It was a process that would be repeated many times over the next decade: young folk music enthusiasts “rediscovering” pre-war recording artists — elderly musicians with predominantly rural backgrounds and perspectives – making albums of them, and introducing them to predominantly young, urban, and middle-class audiences at innumerable folk festivals. While those artists were pleased by the interest their music engendered, and often enjoyed the notoriety they received, such arrangements were not always happy ones.

Buell Kazee, for example, was disappointed with his Folkways album, feeling it had been recorded in too-casual circumstances and did not offer an adequate portrait of his abilities and repertoire. Later, in the Vietnam years, when Kazee shared festival stages with the likes of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, his conservative sensibility was scandalized by the radical social notions that were the calling-cards of the Folk Revival. After all, however much the revivalists honored the Rediscovered as elder statesmen, the latter had reëmerged into the cultural universe of the former, who called the tunes and determined (however inadvertently) how their “contemporary ancestors,” saved from obscurity, were presented.

Buell Kazee died in 1976 and Buell Kazee, conceived as a memorial album for the man, was released on LP that year by June Appal, the imprint of the Appalshop media center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It was the first attempt — and a successful one, both in its release and now in its reissue — to showcase the broad and nuanced context of Kazee’s music and biography, drawing on recordings made in the 1960s by ex-New Lost City Rambler John Cohen, folk documentarian Mark Wilson (responsible for many other fine recordings of old-time musicians), Kentucky Educational Television, and Buell himself. Here are Child ballads; songs of teamsters and a railroad track-lining gang (the latter composed by Kazee); popular country tunes; a blues interpretation; and two very beautiful hymns, sung accompanied. There are no hillbilly skits included.

That this subtle vindication of Buell Kazee should be provided by Appalshop is fitting, though to be fair, he is not in desperate need of it. The power and beauty of his 1920s recordings are not remotely in dispute. But a legacy of Harry Smith’s “exotic” Anthology, for all its inclusive brilliance, is a fetish of pre-war folk musicians as foggy denizens of a mystical, bestial, primitive place, their ballads and banjo tunes emanating from the crackly surface of an old 78 like some kind of speech-in-tongues or tribal utterance. Appalachia, of course, is used to this sort of exoticism, from (but certainly not beginning with) D.W. Griffith’s 1909 film “The Mountaineer’s Honor,” through “The Beverly Hillbillies,” to the current voyeuristic fascination exerted upon it by the likes of New York City’s Vice magazine.

Appalshop, however, has been working hard in the face of this trend. The media cooperative, founded in 1969, assists Appalachian filmmakers in the telling of their own stories and those of their region, and it has become one of the most visible and highly regarded advocates of rural issues, be they cultural, political, environmental, or aesthetic. Through its films, theater productions, radio broadcasts, and symposiums, Appalshop has proven that the reality of life in Appalachia resists pat generalizations and has gone far in asserting the complexities of the experiences, perspectives, and personalities of Appalachians.

For Buell Kazee was nothing if not complex. Despite the fervor of his calling, nearly his entire life was marked by the struggle to reconcile his love and talent for music with his faith and devotion to his ministry. He disagreed with the assertion that the old mountain ballads should be exempt from sophisticated musical interpretation, as he considered them among the world’s great poetry. And though, as Loyal Jones remarks, rediscovery “was not a totally happy experience for Buell,” it gave him the opportunity to “tell the story of his music, to create a spell,” and to enjoy the ovations of audiences edified and entertained by his performances. These complexities, illustrative of a thoughtful and sensitive man, helped to make Buell Kazee the profound musician he was. Appalshop deserves thanks for giving us the chance to consider him anew.

• •

Buell Kazee, the CD reissue on June Appal, is now available from, among other outlets, http://www.appalshop.org/store/.

The University of Kentucky Press has recently published a new book of James Archambeault’s photographs, Historic Kentucky, the fifth in his catalog of Kentucky photo volumes. The images therein are among Archambeault’s most evocative and moving, and are, to the credit of all, accompanied by a Wendell Berry forward and an introduction by the artist, both of which place the images in their contemporary context. Namely (and crudely): the places seen in this book are history, in the vernacular sense of the phrase, or are rapidly becoming it.

In his preface, Berry (the greatest living Kentuckian thinker and writer) quotes the late Guy Davenport (one of the greatest, living or dead, Kentuckian thinkers and writers): “every building in the United States is an offense to invested capital. It occupies space which, as greed acknowledges no limits, can be better utilized.” And: “Money has no ears, no eyes, no respect; it’s all gut, mouth, and ass.” Every other page reveals a homestead, a general store, a meeting house that, as the photographer wryly notes in caption after caption, is no more, having either been left to rot into neglected ground or torn down to make way for some whim of invested capital, be it one of agribusiness, energy concern, or pork-barrel politic. A gorgeous view of the Wildnerness Road that brought pioneer families across the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky is included here – hike that trail now and where once our frontiering ancestors saw the ridges, hollers, and creeks of the Kentucke promised land you’ll find mountaintops ripped off for the coal underneath.

Most Kentuckians have a weakness for waxing rhapsodic about the natural riches of our state and the romantic lives we have lived in, on, and among them – horse farms in the Bluegrass; steamboats down the Ohio into the Mississippi; covered bridges over the countless creeks, streams, and branches; Daniel Boone trekking through the Red River Gorge – but I wonder how many of those with the privilege to wile away their hours in flights of pastoral fancy consider the havoc the market is wreaking on their natural and historical idylls. Kentucky romanticism is a big business; coffee table books, calendars, greeting cards, encyclopedias honoring some stripe of the state’s character or other are legion. Archambeault’s previous books are among the most visible (and beautiful) manifestations of this self-regard, and it’s a vindicating thing that Historic Kentucky has come out, just in time for Christmas, to remind his fellows of the rapacity of gut, mouth, and ass threatening the magnificent sites and sights of the Commonwealth.