♪ - 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.

♪