Rural Routes Film Fest shows restored Appalshop film on Nimrod Workman
The Rural Routes Film Festival in NYC has been showing many great films made in West Virginia since it was founded in 2003, giving top awards to “Dental Farmer,” Mimi Pickering’s film on Hazel Dickens, “It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song,”(which premiered in WV at the Sutton WV Filmmakers Film Festival) and other films. Unfortunately, some of WV’s best filmmakers like Ray Schmitt have had their world-class films rejected by the festival. This year they screened several films from the Appalshop archives including the 1975 film “Nimrod Workman - To Fit My Own Catagory,” which is about a musician/coal miner/activist who spent most of his life in WV.
Here is the description from the RRFF website -Nimrod Workman: To Fit My Own Category – brand new 16mm print!
Scott Faulkner and Anthony Slone, 1975, 35 min., doc
Chattaroy, Mingo County, WV Born in 1895 in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Nimrod entered the mines at age 14 and in the early 1920s worked alongside Mother Jones in West Virginia, and participated in the Battle of Blair Mountain uprising. Forced to retire decades later due to black lung disease, he continued to sing at folk festivals and made appearances in the films Coal Miner’s Daughter and Harlan County U.S.A. In 1986 he received the National Endowment for the Art’s National Heritage Award in recognition of his ballad singing and musical repertoire. To Fit My Own Category is an intimate portrait of Nimrod and his wife Molly, who sang and performed together in later years. Nimrod reminisces about coalmining, union organizing, and his eighty-three years in the mountains, inter-cut with impromptu performances of ballads, including his own “Coal Black Mining Blues” and “Watergate Boogie.”
