COALkathy mattea

“Mattea remains one of Nashville’s most spiritual ”...sregnis Brian Mansfeld, USA TODAY

Track Listing

Guest performances by

Patty Loveless, Marty Stuart, Tim and Mollie O’Brien

CAPTAINPOTATORECORDS

http://www.mattea.comhttp://www.imnworld.com/kathymattea

278 Main Street, Gloucester, MA 01930 | Tel: 978/283-2883 | Fax: 978/283-2330 | http://www.imnworld.com/ | INTERNATIONAL MUSIC NETWORK

Grammy award winner and environmental activist Kathy Mattea has explored music's most basic human essence - melodies steeped in emotion, timeless narratives delivered with beauty by an unmistakable voice. Known for such classic hits as "Eighteen Wheels and A Dozen Roses," Kathy has always dreamed quietly about one day recording an album like COAL.

Raised near Charleston, West Virginia, her childhood was immersed in the Appalachian culture and her mining heritage is thick; both her parents grew up in coal camps, her grandfathers were miners, and her mother worked for the local UMWA. But the songs on COAL are more than just mining songs. Kathy says she wanted to pay tribute to "my place and my people."

Kathy's cultural backdrop gave birth to songs that told the stories of the people who performed the labor, and whose families were born and raised in the culture of the mine.  From this life experience, songs of love, sadness, faith and celebration emerged from front porches and churches and unfortunately, all too often from funerals.  The entire lives of families were tied to the mine and their music is the story of Appalachia - a story of tradition, family, honor and values.  But this story transcends those mountains into the many other mining regions throughout the country, from the gold mines of California to the copper mines of Vermont, Michigan and throughout America.

"I knew the time was right," says Kathy. The idea for COAL began to gel during the Sago Mine Disaster, which killed twelve WV miners in 2006. COAL forced her to dig deep to find the power to let these songs come forth. Co-producer Marty Stuart understood her core relationship to these songs, that they were "in [her] blood." Kathy says, "I think there's a mystery there. Somewhere in my DNA, there's my great-grandmother singing, my grandma, and my people, singing through me, with me."

For her performances in the 2010-2011 season, Kathy Mattea performs with a very select group of musicians who evoke the rich, cultural atmosphere of her new record along with her greatest hits to intimately connect with her audience. It will be a unique opportunity for fans to explore and rediscover an excep-tional view of the American musical landscape through the eyes of a world-class singer and performer.

The L&N Don't Stop Here AnymoreBlue Diamond MinesRed-Winged Black BirdLawrence JonesGreen Rolling HillsCoal TattooSally In The GardenYou'll Never Leave Harlan AliveDark As A DungeonComing Of The RoadsBlack Lung

KATHY MATTEA “Mattea remains one of Nashville’s most spiritual singers, and the songs she sings about love lost and humility are as fine as any she has recorded.” –Brian Mansfield USA TODAY “Her voice stands out as a rare blend of warmth and power …” –Thomas Kintner HARTFORD COURANT “…Mattea’s articulate, quietly resonant voice and pop-rock arrangements put her in modern country’s honors sections with the likes of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Nanci Griffith.” –Ben Horowitz NEWARK STAR LEDGER “The soothing, elegant connection between country, folk, and Celtic.” Mario Taradell, DALLAS MORNING NEWS “ (Mattea) has often set her musical sights higher than the sort of cliché-ridden romantic fodder for moonstruck teens and self-absorbed twentysomethings that's so typical with contemporary country radio fare. ” Bob Allen, AMAZON.COM “The West Virginia-born singer and acoustic guitarist… has finally eased herself out of the Nashville mainstream, and it suits her well.” Bill Ellis, MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL

“Mattea's warm alto voice comes across opulently…. high marks for creative expression and originality.” Maria Konicki Dinoia, ALL MUSIC GUIDE

Kathy Mattea Coal (Captain Potato Records)

Release: 4/1/2008

Kathy Mattea, the beloved, Grammy-winning singer of such classics as “18 Wheels and A Dozen Roses,” “Where’ve You Been,” and many other hits says that her new album offered her a “re-education” in singing. That album, COAL, is a re-education for the listener as well, a record that reshapes the way we think about music, reminding us of why we love it so much in the first place. The songs on COAL are more than just mining songs. Mattea says she wanted to pay tribute to “my place and my people” on a record that is as much a textured novel as it is an album. Raised near Charleston, West Virginia, her mining heritage is thick: both her parents grew up in coal camps, both her grandfathers were miners, her mother worked for the local UMWA. Her father was saved from the mines by an uncle who paid his way through college. “It’s a coming together of a lot of different threads in my life,” Mattea says. Mattea’s childhood was steeped in the culture of mining and Appalachia, but despite having a wide range of influences and “being a sponge about music,” she wasn't exposed to much traditional mountain music. “I never thought I had an ear for singing real heavy Appalachian music,” she says. “I marvel at the wonder of someone like Hazel Dickens, I just never thought I could do that.” Still, she dreamed quietly about one day recording an album like COAL. Mattea says she has been thinking about making this album since she was 19 years old and first heard “Dark as a Dungeon”. From there on out she quietly cataloged mining and mountain songs that she would someday record. But the album was just a sketch of an idea until the Sago Mine Disaster, which killed twelve West Virginia miners in 2006. “I thought, ‘Now is the time to do these songs’. Sago was the thing that brought it all back to the surface,” she says. “When I was about nine, 78 miners were killed in The Farmington Disaster, near Fairmont in 1968. When Sago happened, I got catapulted back to that moment in my life and I thought, ‘I need to do something with this emotion, and maybe this album is the place to channel it’. And so I knew the time was right.” It was a life-altering decision, one that would forever change the way she thought about music and singing. “This record reached out and took me. It called to me to be made,” Mattea says. “If you go through your life and you try to be open, you try to think how can you be of service, how can your gifts best be used in the world…if you ask that question everyday, you find yourself at the answer. And it's not always what you thought it would be when you asked." She found herself discovering a part of herself she had never known before. “I had to unlearn a lot about singing. These songs are about getting out of the way; it’s about being with the song, opening a space and letting the song come through you.” Known as one of the consummate songcatchers, Mattea has worked her magic again: there's not a bad song in the bunch. “When I decided to do this, I wanted to be very careful about the songs I chose. I wanted some labor songs, some songs that articulated the lifestyle, the bigger struggles, and I wanted a wide variety musically,” Mattea says. “Most of all, I wanted it to speak to the sense of place and the sense of attachment people have to each other and to the land.” She chose songs by such celebrated songwriters as Jean Ritchie, Billy Edd Wheeler, Hazel Dickens, Si Kahn, Utah Phillips, Merle Travis, and Darrell Scott. Mattea says she’s had good luck picking songs because she goes with her gut. “I’ve found so much of my voice through interpreting other people’s songs, it’s like a marriage,” Mattea says. “I’m breathing something into the song, collaborating with the writers on bringing something forth.”

But, she says, these songs had to go beyond that. “With these songs, it’s not about how you sound, it’s about sheer communication and expression, and a way to give voice to someone else's life experiences. It's being a voice for a whole group of people, a place, a way of life. And that's a sacred use of music." Her delivery of the songs approaches the sacred as well. Mattea bares herself on performances like her a capella vocal of “Black Lung,” which reveals a singer at the height of her powers (and.left onlookers in the studio in tears). She never over-sings, quietly and subtly working her way through the powerful ballad “The Coming of the Roads” so that she delivers an emotional punch before the listener has even realized it. There is the pumping energy of “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” and “Coal Tattoo,” the beautiful, understated pain of songs like “Red-Winged Black Bird” and “Lawrence Jones.” Her delivery of “Green Rolling Hills” is so full of pride and joy that the listener will wish to be a West Virginian, too, just to feel such beautiful homesickness. Mattea wanted someone who could guide her with a firm, knowledgeable hand to work as the album’s producer. Marty Stuart is well-known as a singer-songwriter but has been gaining a reputation as a seasoned producer as well, and he seemed the logical choice. “Marty has a relationship to a commercial career and to this music, just like me; he understands that balance. And he’s been playing it since he was thirteen; he has a vocabulary in hillbilly music,” Mattea says. “He brought things into focus that I couldn’t see on my own. He’s a dream to work with, he’s just brilliant and so generous.” The pickers on this album are a small, impressive lot that were as carefully chosen as the songs and the producer. Providing percussion on Mattea’s first drum-less album is Byron House on upright bass. “Byron is very important to this record,” Mattea says. “His slap bass is a big part of the sound. He is a total ensemble player, a brilliant musician with no ego." Mattea has played with guitarist Bill Cooley for 20 years and calls him “my silent partner, my unspoken collaborator on everything I do... I have been orbiting around him, musically, for a long time.” Stuart Duncan offers mandolin, banjo (which is featured on his own transitional track with “Sally in the Garden”), and fiddle. “He’s like Appalachian yoga,” Mattea says. “There’s never a note that doesn’t come out perfectly. It’s so Zen.” These three main pickers are joined by Stuart, who plays guitar, mandolin, mandola, and sings with Patty Loveless for background vocals on “Blue Diamond Mines.” Also supplying background vocals are Tim O’Brien (“my brother,” Mattea says) and his sister, Mollie O’Brien, who belt it out on “Green Rolling Hills.” John Catchings offers a haunting cello, Mattea band member and studio veteran Randy Leago contributes keyboard and accordion accents, and legendary steel player Fred Newell makes a guest appearance. Singer, songs, producer, pickers have all come together flawlessly to form a career record for Mattea and a great gift for music lovers. Mattea says she had to dig really deep, to get to the dark and light places that held the power for her to let these songs come forth; but on the other hand, she sometimes worried that the songs were “almost too effortless to sing.” Upon admitting this to Stuart, he didn’t miss a beat before telling her that he wasn’t surprised. “That’s because it’s in your blood, pal,” he said. Mattea likes this explanation. “I think there’s a mystery there: that somewhere in me, in my DNA, there’s my great grandmother singing, and my grandmother, and my people, singing through me, with me” she says. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel like work.” Publicity: Traci Thomas Thirty Tigers 615.664.1167 traci@thirtytigers.com.

BILL COOLEY A native of Santa Barbara, CA, Bill has been a stalwart Nashville veteran for over 20 years, called "one of Nashville's most respected sidemen" by Guitar Player magazine. After working with Merle Haggard in California in the early '80's, he moved to Nashville in 1985 and has toured and recorded with Reba McEntire, Alan Jackson and Hal Ketchum. Bill has played guitar for Kathy on stage and in the studio for the last 17 years. As a songwriter, he's had his songs recorded by Kathy and Reba, among others.

Cooley's first CD, titled "Unravel'd," was released in 1997 and nominated for Instrumental Album of the Year at the Nashville Music Awards (he lost to Chet Atkins!) Music Row magazine called it "a magical gem of a guitar record," and Wood & Steel magazine said it was "a terrific acoustic guitar album - Unravel'd is satisfying in the way good music should be."

Bill's second CD, "A Turn in the Road" was released in 2004. Acoustic Guitar magazine wrote "few guitarists cover as much musical ground as thoroughly as Bill Cooley does on his second solo disc." According to Minor 7th.com, "Cooley's forte is laying down any kind of groove with just his fingers and six steel strings." Bill will be a part of Kathy's upcoming COAL tour, as well as her Christmas tour. He also has plans to enter the studio soon and start work on his 3rd instrumental CD. EAMONN O'ROURKE Eamonn O'Rourke was born in County Donegal, Ireland. He grew up in a very musical family and took an interest to music at a very young age. Eamonn plays bass, guitar, violin, and mandolin. He began his professional career in his late teens, playing with small, local irish bands. Eamonn moved to New York in 1993 to further his musical career. Since moving to the United States he has had wonderful opportunities. Eamonn has worked with a wide variety of artists throughout the United States and Canada. He was given the chance to study with the great Mark O'Connor. He has also had a successful career as a session musician. Eamonn has enjoyed producing and composing numerous albums in his studio on Long Island. In 2002 Eamonn was given the wonderful opportunity to join Kathy Mattea. He is delighted to rejoin Kathy and her band, as a musician and friend, as she embarks on her new acoustic tour. DAVE ROE Dave Roe was raised in Hawaii, and drawn like a moth to the bright lights of Music City in 1980. Since his arrival, he has recorded and toured with a host of legendary artists: Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Dwight Yoakam, Jerry Reed, Chet Atkins, Mel Tillis, Vern Gosdin, Dottie West, Faith Hill, Vince Gill, Iris Dement, and Billy Joe Shaver. He has collaborated on four Grammy Award-winning recordings, including one each with Johnny and June Carter Cash. Although his current focus is recording session work in Nashville studios (“where most of the dough is reaped”), he is occasionally enticed back on the road for a special project, such as Kathy Mattea’s “Moving Mountains” tour. His current hobbies are “battling acne and excema as a result of old age”, and he “dreams of a life free from worry and pop country”.

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Kathy Mattea's 'Coal' fueled by anemotional kinshipBy Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

Kathy Mattea considered herself a grandchild of coal. Both the singer's grandfathers — one an Italianimmigrant, the other of Welsh descent — had worked the West Virginia mines, but Mattea thought she hada generation's distance as she started choosing material for Coal, her new album of mining songs.

"I expected a set of stories," says Mattea, 48. "What I found was a connection to my own history, my own family, my own people."

Mattea, who placed 15 consecutive top 10 singles on the country charts in the mid-'80s and early '90s, had her best-known hits with storytelling songs such as Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses and Where've You Been. But the tales in songs such as Coal Tattoo and Red-Winged Blackbird struck closer to home.

"I thought I'd be slightly detached," she says. "Instead, it came from the inside out. That was the piece I didn't expect, to feel so much a sense that it was my place to tell the story. This record, it just reached out and took me."

Fellow country singer Marty Stuart produced Coal. "I saw the integrity with which she was approaching it," Stuart says, "and I thought, 'Man, this is not going to be a fashion statement. This is going to be something she lives.' "

The idea for Coal took shape after the 2006 mining disaster in Sago, W. Va., in which a dozen miners died.

"That really affected me emotionally," Mattea says. "When I was 9, there was another big (West Virginia) disaster where miners were killed," the 1968 Farmington explosion that killed 78. "I think some part of me was reliving that, processing old emotions."

Country music has a rich tradition of coal songs, comparable to its catalogs of murder ballads and railroad tunes. Some songs on Coal, such as Merle Travis' Dark as a Dungeon, are more than a half-century old. Others, such as Darrell Scott's 1997 chilling You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive, are more recent.

In her search for material, Mattea dug through songs from scratchy 78s and CDs by Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle. "I have hundreds of songs on my iPod, and they're still being written," she says. About half the album's songs eventually came from three sources: West Virginia songwriter/folklorist Billy Edd Wheeler and folk singers Jean Ritchie and Hazel Dickens. One, an a cappella rendition of Black Lung, about the death of Dickens' brother, provides a poignant finale.

"It took me six months to learn to sing that song," Mattea says, "and I still feel like I'm just scratching the surface."

The songs Mattea found ring with hardship and hope, with an attachment to the land for better or for worse,

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and with an inescapable intimacy with danger and early death. "It's such a basic expression that we all resonate with it," Mattea says. "The struggle to be heard, the struggles against injustice."

Miners are like firefighters or police officers, "anybody who's in a high-risk profession," she says. "The whole family just holds their breath every day when they go to work. That's part of why the emotions run high. A big part of you is on hold all the time, because you know someone you love is at risk."

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By Ben SalmonThe Bulletin

Here’s a depressing little exercise for you to try: Hop on the Internet, visit

Google Maps, and search for “Danville, W.Va.” Once you’re in Danville, click over to “Satellite” view and zoom out a little bit.

See that giant, grayish area west of town? That’s where a coal-extraction company has blown off the top of a mountain to make its job easier.

Now, zoom out more, and fol-low the trail of grayish spots that pockmark the rolling, green hills of the Appalachian Mountains to the southwest of Danville, extending across West Virginia and into eastern Kentucky.

Every one of those spots rep-resents what used to be a moun-tain. The mountains are now flat, thanks to the extraction method known as mountaintop removal.

Coal is king in eastern Ken-tucky, as well as in West Vir-ginia, where country music star Kathy Mattea grew up. Mattea, who’ll play Sunday at the Tower Theatre in Bend (see “If You Go”), is from Cross Lanes, W.Va., just outside the state capital of Charleston and about 30 miles north of that huge gray patch

near Danville.Her parents didn’t work in the

mines, though her mom was a secretary for the miners’ union. But both Mattea’s grandfathers were coal miners, and in West Virginia, that’s enough.

“Even when it’s your grand-parents, there’s a lot of that lore that gets passed down,” she said Monday in a telephone interview from her home in Nashville.

Even so, it wasn’t until she moved to Nashville that Mattea really began to understand the connection between the coal industry and folk music. (Even though Mattea owns two Gram-mys in country categories and four Country Music Association awards, her music has always been more in line with the tradi-tions of folk.)

“When I was a tour guide at the (Country Music Hall of Fame) … in Nashville in 1978, I was 19 and I learned all this his-tory about Nashville and country music that I didn’t know. We had old films that played every half-hour … and I would go and sit on my lunch break and watch these things,” Mattea said. “Among our treasures was this film of Merle Travis doing ‘Dark as a Dungeon.’

Kathy Mattea’s new album of coal-mining songs, simply titled “Coal,” is due out early next year. Mattea and other musicians were asked to sing at a memorial service for miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia in 2006.

Courtesy Kristen Barlowe

For the miners

Continued next page

Kathy Mattea’s new album digs into Appalachia’s heart

IF YOU GOWhat: Kathy MatteaWhen: 8 p.m. Sunday, doors open at 7 p.m.Where: Tower Theatre, 835 N.W. Wall St., Bend

Cost: $38 in advance, $41 at the door. Tickets available through the Tower by calling 317-0700, visiting www.towertheatre.org, or stopping by the box office at 835 N.W. Wall St., Bend.Contact: 317-0700 or www.towertheatre.org

“That song always stuck with me, and over the years, I realized there were several songs with coal themes that I really liked, and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe some-day I’ll make a record of that stuff,’” Mattea said. “And then the Sago disaster happened last year.”

The Sago disaster, you may remember, was a mine explo-sion that killed a dozen miners in Sago, W.Va., on Jan. 2, 2006. Mat-tea and several other musicians were invited to sing at a memori-al service for the 12 miners, and that experience was the impetus for Mattea’s new project, “Coal,” a collection of coal-mining songs due out next year.

“We went down there and sang, and I thought, ‘Now is the time. This is all right at the fore-front for me,’” she said. “It was just obvious that it was time for me to do it.”

The result is a spare, folky re-cord of coal-mining tunes that span the second half of the 20th century. The track listing isn’t final, but “Dark as a Dungeon,” Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Coal Tattoo” and “Ballad of Lawrence Jones,” a song about a miner killed on the picket line, are possibilities.

Mattea and producer Marty Stuart recorded “Coal” in an acoustic set-up that befits the old-time nature of the songs, she said.

“The thing about this music is it really is roots music. It’s the music of a group of people ex-pressing a way of life,” Mattea said. “It’s much more raw and connected to people living their lives. It’s not about sounding beautiful.”

At about the same time as the Sago disaster, Mattea saw Al Gore present his now-famous slideshow, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about global warm-ing. She was so shaken by what she learned she signed up to be trained to give the presentation herself. (Since then, she has trav-eled across the country doing just that.)

As you might expect, her two interests soon became intertwined.

“Suddenly, every rock I turned over had coal under it,” Mat-tea said with a chuckle. “I got trained to do the Gore slide show, and there were references to coal and fossil fuels in that. And they encouraged us to personal-ize it and I wanted a picture of a (coal) strip mine. So I go look-ing online, and I find this slide of a mountaintop removal site in West Virginia that’s half the size of Manhattan.”

(That’s the one near Danville, by the way.)

“That opened up a whole other

can of worms about mountain-top removal and what’s going on with that,” she said. “I had no clue.”

In fact, Mattea returned to West Virginia to see first-hand the effects of mountaintop re-moval on nearby residents. There’s a video of the trip on her Web site that shows the singer listening to story after story, of-ten driven to tears. And there’s a clip of her stunned silence when asked to describe what she saw.

This week, she found the words.

“It’s like eco-rape, and no one knows about it. It’s a rural place. It’s remote and hard to get to. It’s sparsely populated, and there’s not a lot of industry,” Mattea said. “And coal money powers the state, but the coal companies are mostly headquartered out-side the state. These coal rights were bought in the late 1800s; I have songs about that. They were bought from people who didn’t know what they were sell-ing. So now, basically, the min-eral rights of West Virginia are owned by people who are not West Virginians, but they pay for the campaigns of the people who are in office.

“It’s a very complex and chal-lenging situation, and I’m telling you, man, people do not want to talk about it.”

As is her nature, Mattea is us-ing her celebrity to try to edu-cate people about mountaintop removal and effect change in a way that makes sense for both industry and individuals.

“We have to find a way to talk about the longer view, because nobody wants to change their way of life and everybody gets threatened when we start talk-

ing about this stuff,” she said. “Is there a way that we can all try to come together and listen to each other and find a long-term solu-tion where we can all feel like we’re being heard and consid-ered? That’s the thing I’m look-ing for is civil discourse about the long-term problem.”

The cause is just the latest in a long line of activism that has blossomed late in Mattea’s career. Because she had a string of hits in the late 1980s and early 1990s — including four that reached the very top of the charts — Mattea has been able to devote these last few years to projects that are, if not radio staples, perhaps more rewarding.

“I think I was really lucky with the commercial success I had, because I really didn’t feel like I was compromising artistically. It was a really special time in the music business. The door was wide open to a lot of interesting music,” she said. “When I came up, Nanci Griffith and Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett were being played on mainstream country radio. It was a real, kind of mini-Golden Era, and I feel like I got a chance to get in on it.

“At a certain point, though, you make your choice. You either chase after that, or you say, ‘Well, what do I want to do?’” Mattea continued. “I just decided that I’d had all that. I’ve got the gold records on my wall. I’ve got the Grammys and the CMA awards. Now I can go and push my own boundaries and explore my roots and collaborate with interesting people and have fun.”

Ben Salmon can be reached at 383-0377 or bsalmon@bendbulletin.com.

From previous page

Courtesy Vivian Stockman / www.ohvec.org, flyover courtesy SouthWings.org

Aerial view of a large mountaintop removal site near Kayford, W.Va.

Kathy Mattea present in her past

From country to Celtic, to ‘Coal,’ singer explores her heritage

By Stewart Oksenhorn Aspen, CO Colorado March 23, 2007 ASPEN — Since her descent from the top of the country music charts, a stepping down that was not exactly unwelcome, Kathy Mattea has stopped chasing hits, and started running down her past. The music she has made over her last several albums may not capture listeners of commercial country radio in the way that such songs as 1986’s “Love at the Five and Dime,” or 1988’s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” — a No. 1 hit — did. But the music has resonated with the singer. “The Innocent Years,” from 2000, Mattea’s first album in 17 years that was not released by Mercury Records, explored the sounds of her Celtic heritage, as well as her beginnings as a folk-music lover. “Roses,” from 2002, deepened the Celtic influence with an array of whistles — some played by Mattea herself — and accordions on such tunes as “Isle of Inishmore” and “That’s All the Lumber You Sent.” For her most recent album, 2005’s acoustic-based, song-oriented “Right out of Nowhere,” it was the process of making it that brought Mattea back in time. “We recorded that sitting in a circle, like how I used to play,” said Mattea by phone from her home in Nashville. Last October, in Aspen, Mattea revisited an earlier era when she appeared as a special guest with the annual Tribute to John Denver concerts at the Wheeler Opera House. Mattea’s first-ever solo performance, for a local TV show in her native West Virginia, when she was in 10th grade, was a version of Denver’s “Gospel Changes.”Several years later, as a college student trying to find something meaningful in her life, Mattea sat down in a dorm lobby with a group of folk musicians and played Denver’s “The Eagle and the Hawk.” “To pull out stuff I hadn’t thought of in a long time, that changed my life, that were present at pivotal moments in my life — that was amazing,” said Mattea, of her appearance at the Tribute to Denver concerts. A coal miner’s granddaughter Mattea’s latest project takes her back even further in time, and gets just as close to the core of her personal makeup as the John Denver songs. The album, which is mostly recorded and to be released, Mattea hopes, late this year, is titled “Coal,” and addresses a subject that was a powerful presence in Mattea’s childhood and her family history. Mattea was not exactly raised surrounded by coal mining and all the drama — poverty, union activity, mine disasters — associated with it. Cross Lanes, W.V., unincorporated, semi-suburban area of 60,000 — “like a no-man’s land between the country and the city,” she describes it — was centered around chemical plants. Mattea’s father worked for Monsanto, in several supervisory positions.

Singer Kathy Mattea performs Friday, March 23 at Aspen's Wheeler Opera House. (Kristen Barlowe)

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But both her grandfathers were coal miners. Mattea’s mother worked for the United Mine Workers before she got married. And both of her parents came from genuine coal towns — one 10 miles upriver from Cross Lanes, one 10 miles downriver. “It’s the backdrop against which all the family stories are told,” said Mattea, whose maternal grandfather died, and paternal grandfather retired, before she was born. “A lot of my cousins still live in the town where my mom grew up. There are a lot of threads there.” Mattea was, and remains in a way, close enough to coal culture that she understands how significant the mining industry is in people’s lives. She compares it to farming: to a miner, a mine is more than just a shaft in the ground, much as a farm is more than a patch of land to the person who earns his living from it. The connection between person and place is thick and complex. “There’s this thing about West Virginia, about your roots going really deep,” she said. “I’ll meet people from West Virginia who moved away 25 years ago, and they still think of themselves as West Virginians. It’s the same thing with coal: This is part of you; this is part of your heritage.” West Virginia being part of the musically rich Appalachian region, the mining life worked its way into numeroussongs, led in popularity by Merl Travis’ “Sixteen Tons.” And while there are plenty of songs about the difficulty of working the mines, the well of stories runs deep. There are songs about the unions, and even more about union-busting; about mine explosions and disease; about dreams of something better. There are even songs that express positive sentiments about coal mining; Mattea recalls hearing someone on a TV program saying that he loved the smell of coal. “The interesting thing going through these songs, you get a love/hate picture,” she said. “People love the life, and are so connected to the land.” Finding that faint glimmer of light, while surrounded by so much death and deprivation, gives the genre of the mining song its power. Mattea noted that Bill Cooley, a guitarist with whom she tours, said while recording the “Coal” CD, “God, I see how little hope there is to change things.” “Hope in the face of hopelessness — that’s what’s going on in these songs. There’s dignity in that.” Mattea has been compiling a list of songs — dating as far back as the ’40s, and as recently as the ’90s — related to mining. As she went through the songs, and thought about how she would handle them, she saw that she wanted her voice, and contemporary approach, to serve as a bridge between the old songs and a modern audience unfamiliar with the style of music. She worried that she herself might not be close enough to the songs to deliver them convincingly. “It’s a real challenge,” said Mattea, who expects to include only one song from “Coal” — Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Redwing Blackbird” — when she performs Friday, March 23, at Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House. “I grew up there, but I didn’t actually grow up doing that. I was scared. I wanted to do this stuff justice. I hate that thing when it feels kind of stilted.” “Coal” features straight bluegrass, straight country, straight folk — all styles Mattea felt reasonably comfortable with. But there was another element — what she calls “Appalachian yell singing,” a precursor of bluegrass — that she had only dabbled in before. And one song she was determined to do, Hazel Dickens’ “Black Lung,” that people tried to warn her away from. But Mattea took on the recording as a chance to expand her artistry. She practiced the “yell” singing until she felt she could do it justice. For “Black Lung,” which got an a cappella treatment, she took six months singing it, recording it, playing it back, before she got it right enough. “I felt I got to learn another layer as a singer,” she said. “It was going back and being a student.”

Page 2 of 3Aspen Times News for Aspen Colorado - Arts and Entertainment

3/27/2007http://www.aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070323/AE/70323005&templat...

She also got herself a good teacher: Marty Stuart, the country star who is producing and plays on “Coal.” Stuart hails not from coal country, but from Mississippi. But at the age of 14, he went on the road with bluegrass great Lester Flatt, then played with Doc Watson and Johnny Cash. Stuart has also shown a deep interest in historical music projects: his “Badlands” focused on the Native Americans of South Dakota; “Soul’s Chapel” dug into old-time gospel; and “The Pilgrim” explored his own roots in the deep South. Mattea figures that’s enough of a background to fill in any gaps in her own musical knowledge. “He’s really steeped in this stuff. He has a real reverence for that,” she said. “And playing that bluegrass with Lester, about the coal fields — he has a feel for it.” When Mattea began to slip into her Celtic side on the “Coal” sessions, Stuart had to drag her back. “He said, ‘No, you’ve got to stay on this side of the ocean,’” she recalled. As an exclamation point on the project, Stuart added a bit from “Wildwood Flower” to the tail end of a song. Stuart, said Mattea, had learned the tune from Mother Maybelle Carter herself, as genuine a source of American music as there is. “It’s a lovely link to the tradition we’re from,” said Mattea. Kathy Mattea performs at 8 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House. Tickets are $45, available at the Wheeler Box Office. Stewart Oksenhorn’s e-mail address is stewart@aspentimes.com

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Page 3 of 3Aspen Times News for Aspen Colorado - Arts and Entertainment

3/27/2007http://www.aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070323/AE/70323005&templat...