I hope when I get old, I'm as spry and sharp as Nimrod Workman was. When he recorded the sessions that make up I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful, he was 87 years old but had a mighty voice, a keen sense of humor, and a strong memory, recalling songs he had learned at the beginning of his life. Born in rural Kentucky in 1895, he began working in the coalmines at 14, and when he retired more than 40 years later, it was only due to a slipped disc and black lung. He was a union man, marching with Mother Jones in the 1920s and lobbying Congress in the 1960s for black lung compensation. He drank, smoked, fathered 13 children with his wife Mollie, released two albums in the 1970s, inspired a documentary, appeared in Coal Miner's Daughter in 1980, and recorded these Beautiful sessions in 1982. Never trained as a musician, the octogenarian sings with all the giddy irreverence of a five-year-old.
These sessions were recorded by Mike Seeger, a musician and folklorist (and Pete Seeger's half-brother) who received an NEA Folk Arts grant to document Workman's vast repertoire of songs. He spent several days at the singer's home in East Tennessee, interviewing and capturing his off-the-cuff performances. With no accompaniment, Workman rattles off hymns, jigs, comic tunes, dance numbers, war whoops, and Appalachian ballads, his sandpapery voice ringing clear with every note. It doesn't take much prompting to get him started talking about his grandfather's service in the "Yankee Rebel war" or about the long hours in the mines, when he would sing to himself while he loaded the coal cars.
Workman is certainly entertaining company. He keens out "Casey Jones" with remarkable power and worries over mortality on the eerie "Oh Death". Toothless, he makes a mash of consonants, but spits out the impossibly wordy "Good Morning" and "Little David, Play on Your Harp" with fast-talking verve and precision. He composed innumerable songs, but rarely, if ever, wrote them down: "42 Years" and "Coal Black Mining Blues" have real gravity in their low-key melodies, the latter stopping abruptly so Workman can recount his fight to make black lung a medically recognized ailment. A few tracks later, he's savoring the nonsense syllables of "Sourwood Mountain" and testifying mightily on the traditional "Barbara Allen".
For Workman as for many of his generation, singing served a very different purpose than it does for most current artists. During a time when music had a largely social function-- providing entertainment at gatherings or simply a reason to gather-- circumstances made it a solitary pursuit for him: Workman sang to keep himself company in the mines and to derive that simple pleasure from creating a joyful noise. His memory remained strong, recalling songs several decades old that still carried powerful meaning for him. He treats them like old friends, and that affection makes I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful not simply a catalog of 20th-century songs, but an amusing and affecting record of a man gleefully singing his autobiography.
