Underground Man

By Justin Taylor

January 20, 2009

Harlan County USA, Barbara Kopple's account of the 1973-74miners' strike in Brookside, Kentucky, opens with a spellbindingmontage of miners working underground: a blast goes off; support beamsare hammered into place; big machines spin and grind, mincing rock; anendless river of coal flows by on a conveyor belt. When the workdayends, some men ride the conveyor belt back to the surface. Others driveout of the shaft on wide, low, truck-like vehicles. From a distance,the camera follows two men carrying lunch pails as they walk down agravel road, away from the mine. A song comes on. It is sung by onevoice, unaccompanied. We can tell that the singer is male, old and hasa heavy regional--if not precisely local--accent. Over footage of themen walking, and then some shots of company housing (which, at thetime, did not have running water or heat), he sings:

For forty-two years
Is a mighty long time
I labored untold
Down in a coal mine

Down in a deep hole
Where the bright lights did glow
Back in a dark room
A-spadin' up coal.

Only now do we get to see the man. He's sitting in a rocking chairon a porch, wearing a jacket over a light blue shirt and a brown fedorawith a band. It's a sunny day. He looks even older than he sounds. Hehas sharp, deep-set eyes, an impossibly wrinkled face and a caved-inmouth showing no evidence of teeth whatsoever. Leaning forward in thechair, he continues to sing:

My bones they did ache me
My kneecaps got bad
Down on a hard rock
On a set of knee pads

The motors were shifting
I got sand in my hair
Both lungs were broke down
From breathing bad air.

This is Nimrod Workman, and "42 Years" is his own autobiographicalcomposition. Born in 1895 in Martin County, Kentucky, Workman went intothe mines at 14. As he tells it on the recently released andsurpassingly excellent I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful(Twos & Fews/Drag City; $14.98), he sang to keep himself companywhile he worked. "When I went into the coal mines...be back in a darkroom by myself.... Couldn't hear nobody nowhere. Just nothin' but meand my light in that dark place, and I'd be loadin' my car, and I'dsing 'til it get loaded. And I learned to just sing and it don't botherme."

Workman toiled underground not in Harlan, but in nearby MingoCounty, West Virginia, a region with a bloody and storied labor historyall its own. After black lung and a slipped disc forced Workman toretire from mining in 1951, he focused more of his energy on hissinging and became something of a legendary character in the regionalfolk scene. But he never lost his political edge--or savvy. The man whohad marched with Mother Jones in the early '20s spent the early '70sworking with a group of miners to petition Senator Robert Byrd. Theywere fighting for recognition of black lung as a serious tradehazard--coal operators and company doctors denied that coal dust wasthe cause of black lung--and compensation for their suffering. Theyeventually succeeded.)

Around the time of the Brookside strike, Jack Wright put out NimrodWorkman's first recording, a 45 called "Lay Down My Pick and Shovel."It was followed shortly thereafter by Passing Through the Garden, an LP recorded with his daughter Phyllis for June Appal Recordings, and then Mother Jones' Willfor Rounder Records in 1978. Though he continued to perform hisunaccompanied music for nearly twenty years, he never released anotherrecord. But this is not to say that he was never recorded. In 1982 MikeSeeger paid two visits to Workman at his home in Mascot, Tennessee.Seeger stayed with Workman and his wife Mollie for three days in June,then two more days in November. He had an NEA Folk Arts grant andwanted to record "as much of Nimrod's repertoire as possible withoutfeeling that we had to make an LP." Seeger later donated what herecorded to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress,where the tapes sat unreleased for more than two decades.

I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful is the first materialfrom those sessions to see public release. Workman's voice is wild andcraggy and delightful. His accent and pronunciation occasionallyswallow up whole syllables or words, and some of his locutions are sostriking--even in the context of archaic mountain lingo--that on afirst hearing I believed them to be whole-cloth inventions. One hymndescribes the power of the Almighty this way: "Great big hand ofGod/You can't do nothin' with it." I won't even pretend to know whathe's saying on "Good Morning," though I'm reasonably sure it's a comedyroutine. Then there's Workman's version of the folk standard, "ShadyGrove," which concludes with a piquant euphemism whose meaning isperhaps a little too clear: "She went down the big mule road/I wentdown behind her/She stooped over to buckle her shoe/And I saw thecoffee grinder."

This is a recording that rewards the close listener and the repeatlistener, especially on those several tracks where the singing issupplemented with narrative. "War Whoops" is a fascinating explanationof Civil War-era hollers used by soldiers to figure out their friends'and enemies' positions. Elsewhere, Workman talks about learning songsas a child, from his grandfather and a man he called Uncle PeterMcNeely, who had come over from England. Those men, as near as I canfigure, were probably born sometime in the 1820s. History seldom feelsso close, or so alive.

Workman added to, subtracted from and otherwise altered songs atwill. This went for traditional as well as contemporary music--whateverhe heard that struck his fancy, he made his own. He molded the songs"to fit my own category," as he once put it (the phrase became thetitle of a documentary about him). One wry example of this fittingprocess is "Lord Daniel," an ancient European lyric ballad about anobleman, his unhappily married wife, her lover and the inevitableresulting tragedy. There are many versions of this song, some named forthe nobleman and some named for the young lover, Mathie Grove, and theycan vary greatly in terms of length and action. (Also, there are manyvariations on the names themselves.) But certain things have to happento advance the essential plot, and it typically falls to a servant ofLord Daniel's to report the wife's transgression. In Workman's version,Lord Daniel's "little footpath" phrases his report to the boss thisway: "another man's in the bed with your wife/both of their hearts isone."

That's an illuminating, piercing little piece of poetry, but it'salso a fascinating mash-up of American vernacular and classicalEuropean language. Another comes later in the same song, when LordDaniel confronts the adulterous couple in bed. He challenges MathieGrove to a duel, but Mathie protests,

How can I fight you for my life?
You've two brand-new swords,
Me not much as a pocket-knife.

One suspects that the pocket-knife was not strictly de rigueur forEnglish nobles, so it stands to reason that this was a change madelater, by someone who perhaps spent a good bit of his time whittling ona porch, or at least around people who did. (In case you're wondering,Lord Daniel gives the sharper of his swords to Mathie Grove so they canduel fairly, then he slays the cuckold with his very first blow.)

Nimrod Workman was born three years before the Spanish-American War.He died at 99, three years after the first Gulf War, in 1994. We arelucky to have this invaluable and deeply pleasurable artifact of histruly remarkable life.