Lord Have Mercy: Olger's Store
 
"The documentary presents the impromptus visit with Jimmy Olgers, a natural-born performer of the sort academic folklorists would label a 'verbal artist.' Olgers is 'on-stage', performing throughout the encounter, much as he would do, presumably, in response to a visit by any inquisitive stranger who stops by his converted storefront museum.The piece engages the viewer in an emergent experience, framed by the filmmaker's first-person point of view in a skillfully executed hand-held camera style and developed through the filmmaker's spontaneous interaction with Olgers and two porch-sitting friends who happen to be present and constitute a kind of in-group audience."
         - Garry W. Barrow, Folklorist

The filmmaker had just completed an interview with retired preacher Harry Byrd Jones in Sutherland, VA.  When Jones experienced the hand-held, first-person-singular camera style and spontaneous interviewing process that is the hallmark of Stan Woodward's work, he said, "You have got to meet Jimmy Olgers and sit on the porch with him at Olgers' Store." With 39 minutes left in the camera, Stan pulled up to the store with his Hi-8 camera running. What proceeds is an uninterrupted 39 minute run of the camera as Jimmy Olgers and Stan Woodward engage in an extemporaneous "verbal artist's" video ballet, where less than ten cuts occur in the finished piece, resulting in 34 minutes of poignant hilarity capturing one of the South's great raconteur's.