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  Valley StylemakersKathy Mattea is Never Far From Coal Country By Maggie Wolff Peterson On her family's farm 20 minutes outside Cross Lanes, W.Va., Kathy Mattea grew up in view of the coal camp where her mother was raised. From the front porch, she could see the coal-fired electric plant that produced energy for users far away. Today, a photo of that plant, with its unearthly landscape and three smoking towers, rises behind Mattea onstage as she performs. Her latest release, "COAL," takes her back to roots music, while sounding as fresh as contemporary Americana. "COAL" was "a threshold for me," Mattea said from her home in Nashville. "I sing everything different because of what I had to learn about going back to my roots, and learning this Appalachian way of singing." Onstage, Mattea is flanked by players on an upright bass, mandolin and guitar. Occasionally, a fiddle wails. The sound is nearly purely acoustic; it is practically unamplified. On the song, "Black Lung," Mattea sings a capella. Other songs on the album, including "Red Winged Blackbird" and "Coal Tattoo," describe the hardships, injuries and loss of life associated with mining. Producing the album was Marty Stuart, a Nashvillian who on the record, employed the guitar given to him by Johnny Cash, who himself received it from Hank Williams.  Mattea began making
radio hits in the 1980s, after arriving in Nashville at age 19. In her family, "I was the different one,"
she said. "I was the arty one. There were no other musicians in my immediate family. My father had a beautiful
voice, but my mother couldn't carry a tune."Mattea's breakthrough hit was "Love at the Five and Dime," which was followed by the number-one song, "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses," and the song that earned Mattea's first Grammy award, written by her husband, "Where've You Been." Probably, Mattea's family expected her to become a scientist. A child who could read the newspaper before entering first grade, she was accelerated through school and graduated at age 16. She entered West Virginia University to study physics, chemistry and engineering, and played "music in every moment of my spare time," she said. When a musician friend told her he was going to Nashville and asked her to come along, "I would never again be able to pretend I didn't know that invitation existed," she said. She quit school. "If I went through life playing it safe, I would never know what happened," Mattea said. Mattea landed a job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame, "living in a crappy apartment and shopping at second-hand stores," she said. But talking to tourists all day was costing Mattea her voice. Ten months into her life in Nashville, and Mattea was thinking of going home. "I took a month of walking to work and walking home everyday, and I would just chew on this decision," she said. She got a new job as a secretary and gave herself another year. "It redefined success for me," she said. Mattea decided that if, within a year, she hadn't succeeded, she had given it her best shot and that was success enough. "I worked really hard," she said. "I got a voice teacher and practiced an hour every day." Mattea got work singing on demo recordings for songwriters and music publishers. "People started hearing my voice," she said. She landed a record contract. And her first record came out "five years to the day, from the day I first rolled into town," she said. Beyond commercial success, Mattea has always hungered for more. "The thing you're longing for as an artist is to do something with some meaning," she said. She has received confirmation along the way. Once, while visiting a radio station for an interview, a woman fell into step with her in a hallway and said her song, "Walking Away a Winner," helped her walk away from an abusive marriage.  The music that Mattea
makes now is connected to activism. In July, while in the region to perform at the Shenandoah Summer Music Festival
in Orkney Springs, Va., Mattea stopped in Charles Town, W.Va., to tour the 90-year-old old Jefferson County Jail.
Today, after a $2.3 million renovation, the 10,000-square-foot building remains in use as courthouse and office
space.But in 1922, it was used to imprison West Virginia coal miners charged with treason for attempting to unionize. "My grandfather was part of that," Mattea said. And even after 30 years in Tennessee, "I still identify as a West Virginian living in Nashville," she said. The new album, "COAL," was inspired after the Sago Mine Disaster, which killed 12 West Virginia miners in 2006. "When I was about nine, 78 miners were killed in the Farmington Disaster, near Fairmont, in 1968," she said. "When Sago happened, I got catapulted back to that moment in my life." She believed her contribution to the story of coal in America would begin with recording mining songs. Mattea's connection to coal now takes the form of attention to energy policy. One of the first to train under Al Gore's Climate Project, Mattea learned to deliver the slide show that became the film, "An Inconvenient Truth." At first, Mattea didn't see the connection between the hardships of mining and the theory of global warming. "I had seen [Gore] the same month as the Sago Disaster," she said. "They seemed completely unrelated at the time. Now, everything in my life is about coal." |
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