Nimrod Workman

Nimrod Workman, an Appalachian singer and songwriter, entered the world in Martin County, Kentucky, during 1895. His full-blooded Cherokee grandfather supplied the name he carried through life. At fourteen he entered the coal mines, remaining underground until 1952, when Black lung disease and chronic back ailments forced his exit. Denied compensation for treatment in common with fellow miners of that era, he threw himself into the labor movement’s campaign for union recognition and began composing songs that chronicled his own and his colleagues’ forty-four years beneath the surface. With his wife Mollie he raised thirteen children. A 1975 documentary, Nimrod Workman: To Fit My Own Category, chronicled his life; he later appeared in the funeral scene of the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter, performed at the 1982 World’s Fair, and was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. Two albums document his music: the 1974 release Passing Thru the Garden, recorded with his daughter Phyllis Boyens, and 2008’s I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful, produced by Mike Seeger. Workman died in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the age of ninety-nine.