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Spotlight On Kathy Mattea
and her newest release, Calling Me Home
 Daring folk-trad
follow-up to Mattea's Coal features contributions from Stuart
Duncan, Bryan Sutton, Tim and Mollie O'Brien and more...
Most artists take fewer and fewer risks as they get older, but
Kathy Mattea is a striking exception. She didn't play it safe while
she charted mainstream country hits - 16 of them reaching the top
ten - and she's not about to start now.
Four years ago, Mattea, one of the most sure-footed country-pop
song interpreters of her generation, caught everyone off guard with
an album of old-timey Appalachian mining songs called Coal. She's
delved even deeper into her Appalachian heritage with Calling Me
Home, available from Sugar Hill on September 11th, 2012, co-produced
with modern acoustic mastermind Gary Paczosa and featuring liner
notes from bestselling author, and Kentucky-born kindred spirit,
Barbara Kingsolver.
Mattea's new direction couldn't have taken her further from her
old way of doing things. Where once she was pitched songs by Music
Row writers, now she collects the generations-old and new but
old-in-soul tunes that move her at folk gatherings, and rounds out
her repertoire through extensive research. Two songs here came from
a CD that Alice Gerrard, of the influential ‘70s folk duo Hazel
& Alice, personally pressed into her hand at one such
festival.
Once Mattea found her songs, there was still the matter of
wrapping her voice around them. A mountain modal folk ballad may
sound like the simplest thing on earth, but that doesn't mean it's
easy to sing. Says Kathy, "My big fear when I made Coal was I didn't
grow up singing this stuff from when I was young. I've had a
commercial music career for decades now. Am I gonna sound like a
lounge singer trying to sing Appalachian songs?" Thankfully,
that fear didn't stop he r from taking the leap, and both Coal and
Calling Me Home offer decisive proof that she's no dilettante. She's
always had a profound respect for traditional folk music - her
ancestors played it, and in college she even took clawhammer banjo
lessons and formed a bluegrass band - but she only recently came to
accept that the music is in her blood. "I had to sing ‘Black Lung'
with Hazel Dickens in the fourth row," she says, referring to the
classic song and the revered Appalachian woman who wrote and sang
it, about the tragic death of her brother. "Now that will grow you
up. Either you own your performance of the song, or you don't."
Even during her radio-ruling days in the late ‘80s and early
‘90s, Kathy was proud of representing the people and place she
hailed from on the global stage, but it was only after she'd been
away from Cross Lanes, West Virginia for some three decades that she
felt called to fully immerse herself in musical appreciation of her
roots. That she sings from the perspective of an Appalachian whose
career took her elsewhere is part of what makes Calling Me Home feel
as contemporary as it does traditional. The top-notch cast of
players doesn't hurt either. The contributions of the multi-talented
Stuart Duncan and Bryan Sutton, along with bassist Byron House,
percussionist Jim Brock, harmonizing siblings and fellow native West
Virginians Tim and Mollie O'Brien and Mattea's longtime guitarist
Bill Cooley, make for a crisp, vivid new-timey string band
palette.
There just isn't a template for a career like Kathy Mattea's. Her
mainstream accomplishments have already earned her a place in the
West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, and, never one to tread water
creatively, she's made her gracefully daring leap into the
roots-honoring trad folk world. "To be a complete novice at
something after you've been singing for three or four decades, to
feel that humility of ‘I don't even know if I'm going to be able to
pull this off again,' it's a great gift," she shares. "A lot of
times people go through their whole lives and never get to that
place."
And it's a very good place for Mattea to be. "I feel like I just
made the album of my life; I articulated something I was put here to
say. It's my childhood and life experience of a sense of place and
culture and history and family, and of all the music that I've
learned and all I've learned performing all rolled into one
thing.
For more music videos, check out "Hello, My Name is Coal" and
"Calling Me Home"
Check out Kathy Mattea's website: www.mattea.com
Thanks for the Music Kathy! |
