A new Louisville-based record label called Twos & Fews (run by one of our favorite Louisville people, Mr. Nathan Salsburg) lets loose its first release today, an album of archival recordings of one Nimrod Workman. We’ll let Nate tell it in his own words:
That album is of the coal miner, union activist, and traditional singer Nimrod Workman, and is entitled “I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful.” It’s an hour of unaccompanied ballads, lyric songs, play party pieces, and religious singing, recorded in 1982 by Mike Seeger (Pete’s half-brother) when Nimrod was 87 years old. It gives Workman (who died at 99 in 1994) his first LP in thirty years, and his first ever CD solo release.
You might have seen Nimrod at the beginning of Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County USA,” or in Alan Lomax’s American Patchwork films “Appalachian Journey” or “Dreams & Songs of the Noble Old.” Or, like most, you have never heard of him. Well… his ain’t party music, but you might find it rewarding, challenging, and beautiful. It’s been an honor and a privilege to put this record together, and if you can bear it in these trying times to do something so anachronistic as to shell out money for music, I’d be thrilled if you’d give Nimrod Workman a chance.
http://www.dragcity.com/catalog/records/dc379.html
http://roothogordie.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/nimrod-workman/
http://www.knoxvoice.com/arts/street-cred/better-stuff/
You can listen to some of the songs available on I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful at the Twos & Fews myspace site, linked above. You can (and should!) purchase the album at all finer record stores as well as online.
