Eden hosts crew filming BBC documentary

By Heather Smith

Published: July 19, 2008

Take a moment to brush aside daily worry over cost, transportation or time, and most may find a world taken for granted. It is familiar to us, like the strings of a long-neglected instrument, if only we have time to revisit them. It is our Southern heritage, our music, our architecture and our stories.

Curiosity and appreciation leads others to this history. It’s what drew a film crew across an ocean to explore.

Jill Nicholls, a slight blonde woman dressed for the July heat, walks hurriedly across the Spray Mercantile Building parking lot, over to two men unloading camera equipment from a sport utility vehicle with Indiana license plates.

“They said if we walk just over to that bridge, you can see the water flowing through the mill,” she said, in a lyrical English accent.

Daniel Meyers hefts a large video camera from its drab plastic case inside the vehicle and holds it to his side.

He hands a boom mic to his colleague, Luke McMahon, and the two start after Nicholls’s energetic pace from the Spray Mercantile Building parking lot to the bridge crossing the Smith River.

Nicholls is an independent filmmaker in her native England and has produced several films for the BBC. Meyer is her camera man, born in California and now living in France. McMahon is associate producer. They huddled on the bridge, recording the thousands of gallons thundering through channels and turbines that powered the mill.

Nicholls is in North Carolina to direct and produce a three-part documentary about American folk music to air on BBC Four. She is paying special attention to Charlie Poole, both his recordings and his life.

“Oh, I think he’s great,” she said. “He was quite a character.”

For more than a century, machines clanked and spun inside Spray Cotton Mill as surely as the water rippled by in the Smith River. The mill stands frozen, appreciated now as more a token of history.

Odd how buildings intended to be neither beautiful nor intimidating serve as an enduring symbol of the past that lives now only in old men’s stories.

Similarly, Charlie Poole, one of Eden’s sons, was not a man saintly nor meek. Grandfathers in Spray barbershops or Draper diners repeat stories of Poole’s drinking and rambling told to them by their fathers.

Poole’s music is not sophisticated or lovely. But it’s true. His voice still manifests in old recordings, a country twang crooning about whiskey and love, work and no work, simple joys and failures that have befallen mankind for centuries. It’s as fresh now as the breeze that floats through cracked panes of giant second-floor windows in the old Nantucket Mill.

“Obviously, American folk music keeps coming up when talking about British music, especially in the ‘60s,” Nicholls said. “At that time so many British musicians were inspired by the American tradition, especially the earlier artists.”

The series’ first installment focuses on bluegrass musicians of the 1920s, the Great Depression and the early recording boom. Poole and his Carolina Ramblers left Spray for New York in 1925 to make records with Columbia.

The crew travels with Kinney Rorrer, widely known as the expert on Charlie Poole. An ancestor, Posey Rorer, was a member of the Carolina Ramblers for a time and recorded with Poole. The younger Rorrer, a retired history professor of Danville (Va.) Community College, plays Poole’s music as well as writes and speaks about him.

“Charlie Poole worked at the Spray Cotton Mill as a spinner,” Rorrer said. “He started there when he was 9 years old and worked his way up to spinner.”

Poole would work for a few months, then ready himself for a bout of traveling and performing and be gone half a year.

“My dad said he’d never ask the mill boss for a job,” Rorrer said. “He’d come in one day, tell the boss ‘I’m coming in tomorrow night, so have some work for me.’ Next day, Daddy said he’d put on his overalls, his wife would pack him a lunch, and he’d walk here from Draper.”

Poole would work at the mill until his wallet was fat, and disappear until he had no cash left.

Local historian Louise Price couldn’t be happier to share with Nicholls’ crew. As president of Piedmont Folk Legacies, she and a few dedicated others started the Charlie Poole Music Festival and now hopes to see plans for the National Banjo Museum become reality.

Price arranged to put the crew and Rorrer inside the mill, to link Rorrer’s tales of a rambling banjo player to the hot, dreary building where generations of Eden residents made their wages.

“There are two rooms inside this mill that are the length of a football field,” Price said. “I love all the mills, but this one, architecturally, it’s just…” And she trailed off, looking up at the giant brick monster.

Property-owner and key-holder Billy Wilson unlocked the large metal door of the Nantucket Mill and beckoned the group into the dark, musty bottom floor of the mill. It took a few moments to assess the size of the room, but once the light-blindness faded, innumerable round timber posts and dark plank floors seemed to stretch for miles. Conveyers and boxes met here and there, and Virginia creeper poked green tendrils in through broken windows.

“The next floor is probably better for this. More light,” Wilson said, turning to the staircase.

Up stairs seemingly from a suspense movie set, Wilson leads the crew into a long room, brighter than the first floor, but musty and sweltering. Sweating, Meyer set up his camera and McMahon readied his audio equipment.

Nicholls prompted Rorrer with a question, and his descriptions evoked the endless noise of huge machines, though the neat rows they stood in are now bare.

Staff writer Heather J. Smith can be reached at or 349-4331, ext. 16.