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On Thursday night at Intuit, Drag City hosts a free event to celebrate the release of I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful, an album of a cappella vocal performances by Kentucky coal miner Nimrod Workman, who was born in 1895 and died in 1994. The recordings collected here were made by folklorist and musician Mike Seeger in 1982, and they’ve never been issued before–the only previous Workman releases I know of are two out-of-print albums, one on June Appal and the other on Rounder, and a 1975 film documentary called “To Fit My Own Category.” The documentary takes its title from something Workman says on-screen–“I made this song to fit my own category”–and indeed the stunning music on the Drag City disc seems to belong to its own world.
The album was produced by Nathan Salsburg, a resident of Louisville, Kentucky, and the production manager of the Alan Lomax Archives. He’s a also a guitarist, and recently turned up on the third volume of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem series.
