The Appalshop Archive is pleased to present a program of films at this year's Rural Route Film Festival. We invite you to join us on Saturday, July 21st from 7-9pm at the Anthology Film Archives for a screening of recently preserved film and video from Archive. The program will feature Nimrod Workman: To Fit My Own Category, a documentary film about the "singing coalminer," as well as the short video Whoa Mule with musician Lee Sexton, and rare performance footage of Ralph Stanley and his band from the early 1970s.   We are excited that the Moonshiners (Two Lost Turkeys?) will treat us to some traditional old-time music both before and after the program.

The Program:

Whoa Mule (Directed by: Herb E. Smith, 1989, 3:00 min., color)
The title song of banjo master Lee Sexton's solo album is featured in this music video--one of the first and only traditional music videos to play on the country music cable channels. The video features scenes of Sexton behind a mule-drawn plow, tending to his three-acre garden in rural Linefork, Kentucky, and a performance of the Lee Sexton Band (which includes the spectacular fiddling of the late Marion Sumner) at a square dance at the Blackey Senior Citizens Center.

[Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys] (1972, b/w, 10 min.)
This footage is believed to be the only extant video of what many consider to be the best Clinch Mountain Boys line-up: teenaged Keith Whitley and Ricky Scaggs, Curly Ray Cline, Jack Cooke and Roy Lee Centers. Centers, whose vocals bore an uncanny resemblance to those of Ralph's deceased brother Carter, was shot to death by a woman's jealous husband two years after this performance in 1974. This video, shot on now-obsolete ½-inch open reel tape, was retrieved from a dumpster by an Appalshop filmmaker in the early 1980s, and was recently preserved by the Appalshop Archive through a grant from the National Television and Video Preservation Foundation.   

Nimrod Workman: To Fit My Own Category (Directed by: Scott Faulkner and Anthony Slone, 1975, b/w, 35 min.)
When asked by an interviewer how he made up songs, Nimrod Workman replied, "I make up songs to fit my own category." Born in 1895 in the hills of eastern Kentucky, he entered the mines at age 14 and in the early 1920s he 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." The Appalshop Archive is proud to present a beautiful new 16mm print for the first time at the Rural Route Film Festival.   

The Appalshop Archive, located at the renowned media-arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, includes thousands of hours of film, videotape, audio recordings as well as photography and supporting materials that portray a multifaceted view of life and history in the Appalachian region. It holds documentation on the most vital individuals in the region including ballad collector John Jacob Niles, authors James Still and Harriette Arnow, and tradition bearers such as storyteller Ray Hicks and folk artist Chester Cornett, as well as living legends including musicians Ralph Stanley, Jean Ritchie, and others. In addition, Appalshop's audiovisual records span a wide range of practices of community institutions such as the Old Regular Baptist Church, and address important social topics like stripmining, labor organizing, in-and-out migration, and Appalachian representation in American popular culture. It is the mission of the Archive to conserve and preserve this great body of work in film, video, audio, and visual images, as it provides irreplaceable windows into understanding part of America's legacy. For more information, visit www.appalshop.org/archive.

To see what else is showing at the Rural Route Film Festival, check it out at
http://www.myspace.com/ruralroutefilmfestival.

Have any questions - drop me a line at chunter@appalshop.org.

Hope to see you there!
-Chad