- Coming up on Best of Our State, we hit the road with muralist Scott Nurkin as he turns brick walls into bold musical tributes.

Then, grab a bucket of popcorn for the retro film series at the Carolina Theatre in Durham.

That's next on Best of Our State.

We dip into the treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor-in-chief of Our State Magazine and your host.

What started as a few paintings in a pizza shop has grown into a statewide tribute to North Carolina's rich musical heritage.

We follow muralist and musician Scott Nurkin as he travels town to town painting grand scale tributes to our state's greatest musical legends.

A journey through sound, soul, and state pride.

♪ - I started the North Carolina Musician Murals Project back in 2020, essentially to celebrate all of these enormous musician talents from our state that were born in various small towns all over North Carolina.

The project has grown into a trail at this point.

I've got, I started with a few, and now I've got 26.

And one of the things I'm excited about is connecting the dots between all these small towns.

It sort of makes a trail.

There's literally, hopefully, no corner of the state you won't find one of these things because we have famous musicians or very talented, professional, incredible musicians from literally every county in the state.

And they all deserve to be celebrated.

So it's really kind of mind-boggling that we have artists in the state that touch every single facet of music, you know, every genre.

And as a musician, I think of these people, not as contemporaries, I wouldn't put myself that high up, but they're definitely people I respect the utmost, highest respect for.

And so to be able to go and paint their images somewhere is like, it's everything to me.

♪ - My name is Scott Nurkin.

I am a mural artist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

My mother saw me very interested in art at a very early age, more so than my older brothers.

So she bought me in a private art class, like I'd say around the age of 10.

And the same thing sort of happened with drums, like right around, I'd say art 10-ish, drums 12-ish.

And then they'd just run kind of neck and neck.

So I've always continued with both paths.

I've played music constantly in bands.

I've been lucky to tour the country six, crisscross the country six times, go to Europe a couple times.

[drumming] But the art has also been right there next to it.

So I am, again, fortunate enough to find a foothold in making murals somewhat sustainable financially.

♪ I grew up in Charlotte, and my musical background, of course I was influenced by my father's and my mother's stuff.

They loved, like, '50s doo-wop, '60s stuff like that, soul music.

But then, of course, when I became a teenager, punk rock was everything.

Sometime during college, I discovered that all of these wonderful musicians happened to be born in the same state.

Like, I knew that there were people like John Coltrane and Charlie Daniels that were affiliated with North Carolina.

But then when I really started to scratch the surface and I found out that there were so many big names-- Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, Earl Scruggs--it kind of blew me away.

It became a mission of mine to tell anybody that would listen about it, because I just thought it was so fascinating that these musicians--not just good musicians, but, like, trailblazers in their genres--all happened to be from the same state.

Me being from North Carolina, I was, like, super proud of it.

I felt like just some sort of tie to it, and I had to figure out how to get the message out.

♪ There was a pizza restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina called Pepper's Pizza.

This is, like, a storied institution that started in the '80s--very cool spot.

Anybody that came through town that was playing at the Cats Cradle would eat there.

The owner of Pepper--rest in peace--David Harvey--was a good buddy of mine, and when he moved spots, he asked me to do a mural at the Pepper--at the new Pepper's.

So I came up with the idea to do North Carolina musicians--portraits of each of the musicians--on top of a mural of North Carolina.

Pepper's eventually closed in 2012, and I thought, "Well, now maybe I can take this out onto the street.

Maybe I can go to these hometowns and convince people to let me paint these portraits of these heroes in the towns."

The very first was Coltrane--John Coltrane.

I knew he was from Hamlet, which is a very small town in the southeast part of the state.

And they graciously offered up this wonderful building that in itself was kind of poetic because it was the Hamlet Opera House that had been built at the beginning of the 1900s.

And from that point, I knew if I had a visual representation of what I wanted to do, I could take to other towns.

In this case, the next town was Shelby, North Carolina, and there were some great people working there that saw it too and said, "This is wonderful."

So they were able to fund two different murals there--one of Don Gibson and the other was Earl Scruggs.

So then I just--they kind of felt like chips or dominoes right there.

And then I had some - and then right after that was Roberta Flack in Black Mountain.

And now, five years later, we have 26 of them with five more to come pretty soon.

[spray can clangs] - Today is the start of the mural for J. Cole.

I put the grid on the wall, cut some wood to fix where these windows are going to be covered by the paint.

And today starts the first--the portrait.

This is like a squiggle grid or a doodle grid.

It's basically helped me find my way.

It's like a cheat code.

So what I did, just to make my life so much easier, I printed out the image on top of it superimposed and took away some of the opacity.

That way I can kind of figure out where do his eyes start, and it's going to be right around here.

So that way it just makes my life easier and kind of gets me to the final product a lot faster.

J. Cole is one of North Carolina's most famous and accomplished musicians.

And the whole point of the music trail is to highlight all those guys and girls.

And so he is number 27, I think, on the trail.

And it's just--today is his day.

Painting one of these takes anywhere from three days to two weeks, depending on size.

It's called organization.

You should look into it.

In addition to getting to paint every day, I get to travel all over the state and see towns that otherwise I probably would never stop through.

And find out about towns that I knew nothing about and the parts of the towns that I knew nothing about.

Discover new restaurants, meet interesting people.

It's really--I mean, I encourage everyone to travel our state all the time.

It's a pretty great state.

And there's just pockets of cool stuff everywhere.

So many times I'll paint someone in a town, and the first response is, "I didn't know they were from here."

And that's sort of like the whole purpose of the project.

That was the reason why I'm doing it.

The best compliment I can get is from someone who'd say something like, "I didn't know who that person was until you painted them, and now I feel like I've discovered them for the first time."

I'm thrilled to hear that kind of thing.

♪ - So this is sort of a collection of my maps, I guess, for the murals I've done, specifically the musician murals.

The reason why these are exclusively in black and white, at least the portrait parts, is just because I like to take the portraits from their heyday or when they were kind of at the pinnacle of their popularity.

And oftentimes it's mostly when they're a lot younger.

So I started with black and white and then naturally just sort of kept going with it, because I like the aesthetic.

I like black and white a lot.

I think it's really cool, black and white photos to me, especially portraits.

Capture something.

Sometimes the color just don't do.

And so to kind of make them uniformly in line with one another, I just kept going with it, and now they're all black and white.

I'm not trying to expand on the portraits any more than they are.

I'm just trying to duplicate them with paint.

I'm not trying to use my own take on them at all.

I'm just trying to honor them as they are.

I always felt like this project, I mean going back to when I realized in college that all these musicians were from here, that it was important to let other people know.

For some reason, I don't know if I can tell you exactly why, I just had a feeling that it was such a cool thing that everyone who likes music should know and be proud of the fact that these giants were also from our state.

♪ My musical education all began and continues to this day informed by North Carolina, being in North Carolina, playing shows in North Carolina, meeting all my musical friends in North Carolina.

So there was just some inherent tie to the whole thing that just felt really cool.

Whether or not I am tied to those people in any way, shape or form, I know that I'm tied to the connection to North Carolina.

♪ - [Elizabeth] Every Friday night, the Carolina Theater in Durham transforms into a time machine thanks to the Retro Film Series, an electric double feature event that brings classic movies back to the big screen.

Fog machines, flashing lights and vintage trailers set the stage for a Friday night full of nostalgia and cinematic magic.

♪ - Why do I love movies so much?

Ah!

♪ - Movies do touch us more deeply, I feel, than any other art form.

When a movie is really working, we have an out of the body experience.

- When the lights go down and the curtain opens, we get to go into another world.

It's very beautiful.

- It's become almost a lost art to see movies in a theater.

When you see them on a big screen, you see them in an audience, especially an appreciative audience.

It's a really unique and powerful experience.

- In an age where streaming has sort of invaded the movie space, the video store, the theater, those were things that made movie watching a communal experience.

And I think that community experience is really important, and that's something like the Retro and the Carolina keeps that alive.

- My name is Jim Carl, and I am one of the founders of the Retro Film Series, which is one of the longest running genre film series in the entire United States.

♪ ♪ - When I started at the theater in 1995, the Carolina Theater had just reopened its doors after a major renovation.

There really hadn't been a lot of thought at that point about what the theater was going to be for the Durham community.

Was it going to be a performing arts space?

Was it going to be a rental facility?

Was it going to be an art house theater?

I came on board when all those questions were still being asked, and I was lucky enough to be one of the people that got to decide.

At that time in the Triangle, there was not a big community of film lovers going to see classics on the big screen, and I thought, well, there's a niche that I think is being underserved in the Triangle that the Carolina Theater could fill.

So I made it my mission from the very beginning to try to put the theater on the map with its film programming, and not just offering the same types of films that you could have seen at your local Megaplex.

I wanted ours to be something you'd see only at the Carolina Theater, and that I knew would be so difficult to replicate because of all the work that it takes, that probably no other theater in the market would even attempt it.

And that's where Retro was really born.

So if you were a first-timer coming to the Carolina Theater and coming to the Retro Film Series, here's what you would see.

- Hi, sign up for door prizes if you're here for Better Off Dead.

Sign up for door prizes.

- First thing you'd notice as you walk into our lobby is that there's this table with all these little white slips on it, and there's door prizes you can sign up for.

Prizes are always based on whatever films are playing that night.

- This one's from Better Off Dead, and this one's from 3 O'Clock High, which is the second half of tonight's double feature.

I am not necessarily a curator.

I am not this type of person who likes to provide a lot of information about the subtext of why you should be coming to see this film at the Carolina Theater.

That's boring.

- Good evening, everyone!

Hi!

[cheers and applause] What I want is for people to have a good time.

So I get up on stage, I draw the prizes, I welcome the audience, and then I get off stage because they're not here to see me.

They're here to see that show.

Thank you for supporting these classic movies on that big screen.

Enjoy it!

[cheers and applause] So once the show begins, they see a title card come up on screen that reads "Tonight's Day Is..." when that film that you're about to watch would have originally happened.

The idea is that you are watching the trailers as they probably would have played at the opening night of whatever film you're coming to see.

- Coming soon to a theater near you.

- I can't remember who met who first or who fell in love with who first.

- And that is the Retro experience.

It's not just the nostalgia.

It's not just classic films back on the big screen.

It's the idea of transporting an audience from present time back to the original night of release.

Nobody else replicates that opening night experience, that "you are there" kind of sensation that retro does.

And I think it's what brings the fans back again and again.

♪ - The philosophy for Retro today is that we want to have a film for everybody that's out there that wants to come back and see films in a theater.

So no matter if you want horror films, the golden age of Hollywood, noir, dramas, war films, science fiction, we have you covered.

And that's the beauty of Retro and that's also the challenge of programming it each season.

So King Kong 1976 is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time since I was a little kid.

And this was my original lunchbox when I was in kindergarten.

And so this nowadays has become where I store all of my slips that the retro fans give me their recommendations.

In this box is probably 3,500 slips.

And this is just from the last six months.

I read every single one of these things.

So the process for selecting films, it's always about the audience.

It's about what the audience tells me they want to see.

At each Friday night Retro, there are these little slips.

The purpose of the slip is for people to write down what is the number one film that they would want to see back on the big screen.

- What did you put down for me?

- Saturday the 14th.

- Are you the one that's been asking for that all these years?

- No.

- Somebody has been asking for Saturday.

- Really?

- Yes.

- God, I love that movie.

- And I can get it.

- Really?

- Pocket full of Miracles?

- Ooh, that would be a good one for the classic series.

- That's what I was thinking.

- Why don't you put down for me?

- I put French Connection.

- We just ran that.

- Last month for Mystery Realm.

And what did you put down?

I can't read it.

- Silence of the Lambs.

- It comes around.

It comes around a lot.

You'll be very happy.

I can honestly say that I do things for the audience that they will never know this is what actually took place.

For example, that very first season, one of the films that people kept asking for was a German film called Fitzcarraldo.

Fitzcarraldo was from a very famous director named Werner Herzog.

- This church remains closed till this town has its opera house.

- Nobody in the United States had U.S.

theatrical screening rights to the film.

If you wanted to run Fitzcarraldo, you had to reach out to Werner Herzog himself.

Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, I'm on the phone talking to Werner Herzog.

And he's asking me, "Well, how are you planning to exhibit my film?"

And I said, "Well, their studio has this print."

He's, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

You cannot.

That film, that print is not suitable for the American audiences.

That print is no good.

You must show my print."

So now I'm thinking, "Okay, now I have to ship probably 60 to 70 pounds of 35mm film across the Atlantic at my expense."

These are the things that sometimes you do back yourself into a corner where you didn't expect to be shipping 70 pounds of film across the Atlantic.

And now you are.

Behind the scenes, putting together a Retro is a lot of work.

It's everything that you see on that screen, I basically have cut and put together myself.

All of the montages, images, trivia, gathering the trailers.

Unless it's Christmas or Thanksgiving, I'm here every Friday.

Every single Friday.

And I would say that the thing that keeps me doing it for 30 years is the audience.

It really is.

I have fans that were at retro the very first night in November 1998 who are still attending today in 2025.

I have fans who went on their first date many years ago at a retro, got married, had kids, and are now bringing their kids to Retro.

The Retro and its legacy is broad.

It's more than just watching classic films on the screen.

After so many years, it has become a part of people's sense of where they belong.

It just gives you an idea of what you're doing is important to people.

That's always nice.

♪ - [Elizabeth] Growing up in North Carolina, muscadines felt like magic.

We didn't have vines in our own yard, but across the street from my grandmother's house, the neighbor did.

She was a kind widow with no grandchildren of her own, and she welcomed us to pick from her trellis of twisting muscadine vines, trained just perfectly for a child like me to wander beneath.

I'd dart through the dappled sunlight, pretending I was in my own secret forest, part fairy tale, part wild adventure.

That's where I learned the art of eating a muscadine, biting through the thick skin, popping the sweet pulp into my mouth, and spitting the seeds into my hand before tossing away the peel.

She always sent us home with ball jars of muscadine jelly, and later I'd learn those grapes made wine, too.

But back then, the treasure was in the vines and in those long, golden afternoons beneath them.

At Thanksgiving, my grandmother would let me pull out her crystal goblets and fill them with ginger ale or cranberry juice.

She'd raise her glass and say, "Prosit," a toast that means "to your health."

She'd learned a little Latin in school, just enough to quote a phrase or two, but she believed that if you understood the roots of a plant or a word, you could understand just about everything.

Years later, one sip of muscadine wine took me right back to those days, to sweet fruit, sunlit vines, and to the woman who taught me to pay attention to language, to seasons, to the things that grow and make life sweeter.

♪ [bright music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - More information about Our State magazine is available at OurState.com or 1-800-948-1409.