SPOTLIGHT ON
KATHY MATTEA AT THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT MUSEUM IN
PHOENIX, ARIZONA Photos by Glenda S.
Paradee
Kathy Mattea performed April 15, 2014
at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona and then also
at The Fox Theater in Tucson, Arizona on April 16,
2014. Mattea had many fans attend both shows.
Many had seen her before and she made many new fans too. She
sings such inspirational music. She sings songs of love, life,
hope, heartfelt, soul music and throws in some sad songs too.
She adds in songs about the environment, and songs about a
car. I call her a world music performer.
Mattea sang many songs off her newest CD titled "Calling Me Home"
and her Grammy nominated CD "Coal". She added all her hits
from throughout her long career.
Throughout her show, she adds in stories about the songs and
experiences she had meeting the songwriters. It makes her show
even more enjoyable when you hear her telling the stories. She
throws in some good humor too.
Kathy Mattea spent time after the shows to meet the fans, sign
autographs and take pictures. She is the type of person that
when you see her in concert or meet her, you can't wait to see her
again.
Kathy will be having a fan club party in Nashville, TN on June 4,
2014. For more information, check out her website at www.mattea.com.

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 Glenda S. Paradee and Kathy
Mattea
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More on Kathy:
Kathy Mattea is one of the most respected female country stars of
her era, a commercially successful hitmaker who was able to bring
elements of folk, bluegrass, gospel, and singer/songwriter intimacy
to her music. Mattea was born in Cross Lane, WV, in 1959 and
received classical voice training starting in junior high, but also
took up the guitar when she discovered folk music. In 1976, while in
college, she joined the bluegrass band Pennsborro and two years
later dropped out of school to move to Nashville. She worked odd
jobs and perfected her songwriting, and in 1983 she landed a deal
with Mercury on the strength of her demo tape. Her self-titled debut
was released in 1984, and the follow-up, From My Heart, appeared the
following year; none of the singles from either record managed to
breach the Top 20.
However, Mattea's third effort, 1986's folky Walk the Way the
Wind Blows, proved to be her breakthrough both critically and
commercially. Her cover of Nanci Griffith's "Love at the Five and
Dime" was her first Top Five hit, and the record produced three
other Top Tens in the title track, "Train of Memories," and "You're
the Power." 1987's follow-up album, Untasted Honey, confirmed
Mattea's newfound stardom, featuring two number one country hits in
"Goin' Gone" and "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses"; "Untold
Stories" and "Life as We Knew It" also made the Top Five. Released
in 1989, Willow in the Wind boasted an even stronger folk influence,
and it became her first album to go gold on the strength of the
number one hits "Burnin' Old Memories" and "Come from the Heart,"
and the number two "She Came from Fort Worth." Additionally, the
album's Top Ten hit "Where've You Been," co-written by her new
husband, Jon Vezner, won her a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal.
Seeking to keep her music fresh by returning to its roots, Mattea
made several trips to Scotland in the early '90s, studying the links
between country music and traditional Scottish folk. Her own music
kept getting rootsier and more eclectic, as 1991's ambitious Time
Passes By featured guest spots by Emmylou Harris, folkies the
Roches, and Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean. The album's
title track and "A Few Good Things Remain" both hit the Top Ten, but
overall the album's singles didn't chart as well as was usual. She
subsequently had throat surgery, but recovered fully to record
1992's Lonesome Standard Time, a less ambitious but still eclectic
album whose title track was a near-Top Ten hit.
Mattea backed off her critically acclaimed recent sound for
1993's more commercial Walking Away a Winner, whose title track
became yet another Top Five hit; however, the same year, she also
issued the gospel-oriented Christmas record Good News, which won a
Grammy for Best Southern/Country/Bluegrass Gospel Album. After a
several-year hiatus, Mattea returned in 1997 with Love Travels,
which balanced her folk and mainstream country leanings; it sold
decently well, but failed to produce any major singles. Mattea
subsequently then recorded the ballad-heavy The Innocent Years, a
heartfelt tribute to her ailing father. Wanting to explore her taste
for Celtic folk, Mattea hopped labels to Narada, for whom she
debuted in 2002 with the eclectic Roses. The holiday album Joy for
Christmas Day arrived in 2003, followed by Right Out of Nowhere in
2005. In 2008, Mattea released the bluegrass-centric Coal for the
Captain Potato label. Mattea followed it with another collection of
songs from mining country entitled Calling Me Home in 2012 for Sugar
Hill.
Calling Me home was, co-produced with modern acoustic mastermind
Gary Paczosa and featuring liner notes from bestselling author, and
Kentucky-born kindred spirit, Barbara Kingsolver. Kathy'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 Kathy 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 her 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."
There's another song from Dickens's pen on Kathy's new album, and
three from Jean Ritchie, another legendary singer and songwriter of
mountain music. Ritchie, now nearing 90, got onto her about altering
a few notes in the melody of Ritchie's "Now Is the Cool of the Day"
when they performed the a cappella, earth-loving gospel song
together live. Kathy chuckles at the audacity it takes to tweak a
song inherited from a major figure in the tradition. But one listen
confirms that bringing her own interpretive gifts and rich, rounded
vocal tone to selections that have received austere,
high-and-lonesome readings over the years is a considerable
contribution, and one that feels perfectly right.
"I don't think I could've sung a lot of these songs when I was
20," says the singer who was twice named the Country Music
Association's Female Vocalist of the Year. "I just don't think I had
the gravitas in my voice to pull it off, to tell you the truth."
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.
Kathy not only celebrates what she loves about the place where
she grew up, but wrestles with the necessary evils her people have
endured in the name of survival-both of her grandfathers mined coal,
her mother worked for the union and her brother ships it to power
plants-and grieves over both the destruction coal mining has wrought
on the land and the passing of the generations who served as the
communities' glues. That's called telling it like it really and
truly is.
Of one of the songs she chose to record, Kathy notes, "'Black
Waters' was written in 1970 or '71, and it is so valid right now. I
mean, people are living that story right now. I love that it clearly
articulates that experience, and also that, inadvertently, it
articulates how little has changed."
Kathy traveled quite the journey to reach the point where she was
ready to advocate for the environment in her music. Twenty years
ago, she was courageous enough to take a lonely stand for HIV/AIDS
awareness on the stage of the CMA Awards, then organize an album
whose proceeds benefited research of the disease. But she didn't
necessarily sing about that sort of thing back then. "I mean, I
didn't set out to be an activist," she explains. "It's just that
there have been moments where I couldn't not speak, because of
something I valued."
The music of the Occupy Wall Street movement has shown that
beat-you-over-the-head protest songs don't resonate as well with
people today, and Kathy's song selection is perfectly in step with
the moment. She gravitates toward grounded storytelling, singing
from the points-of-view of a maple tree, a miner's wife, a
homesteader on family land, an Appalachian expat? even of coal
itself. Just as importantly, from start to finish her chosen
material affirms a shared sense of humanity. She reflects, "I just
feel like these songs speak for all Appalachians. I wanted to sing
for something-not against something."
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 Kathy 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."
Thanks For The Music Kathy! |