Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
West Virginia’s sweetheart may have moved to Nashville way back in 1978, but her love of the Mountain State runs deep, her connection to it unbreakable, the memories of it fueling some of her most personal work. Her life leading up to that point was dotted with prescient moments suggesting a wildly successful career ahead, even if stardom seemed like a long shot at the time. Kathy Mattea knew that going in. Musicians crash and burn in Nashville every day. Some cling to their dreams by fronting mediocre honky-tonk bands, holding down day jobs while churning through weepy sets of country-music standards on the weekends. Others become studio musicians, a lucky few earning a living doing what they love, some occasionally going on tour, their careers spent in the shadow of stardom. Rarer still are the ones who break through to become stars themselves. Those that do are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Kathy Mattea knew all of that the day she pulled out of her parent’s driveway in Cross Lanes.
“My mom didn’t want me to go,” Mattea says. “She didn’t see a future in it. She wanted me to stay in school and get my degree.”
Mattea left home with her gut and her guitar and the knowledge that she might never sign with a major label, that she might never hear herself on the radio, that she might never score a hit song. That was the chance she was willing to take. She was never in it for the money, never driven by the fame. She simply had to know. Fast-forward: The back-to-back CMA Female Vocalist of the Year honors, the two Grammys, and four No. 1 hit singles are the byproduct of heeding the call, of treating her guitar like a divining rod and following the vibrations all the way to Music City, U.S.A. Accolades aren’t why she rolled the dice. Stardom and validation are two different things. Kathy Mattea was birthed into this world to perform, and while she instinctively knew her talent was real, she needed Nashville to prove herself right.
“Nashville was my dream. It got to the point where it was now or never. If I didn’t go, then I’d spend the rest of my life wondering, ‘What if?’ I didn’t want to have that rolling around in the back of my mind.”
The West Virginia University dropout didn’t arrive with the luxury of built-in connections to country music’s elite – she hadn’t been discovered at a trade show when she was 11, the way that Barbara Mandrell had been discovered by Chet Adkins, nor was she related to a Nashville superstar, as was the case with Crystal Gale, whose sister was the legendary Loretta Lynn. Mattea simply showed up and took a job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
“Like everybody else, I had to pay the bills,” she says. “It was all part of the journey.”
Mattea had always been allergic to bullshit, which meant that she’d never bullshit herself. She was ambitious, yes, but she also had common sense. There were no guarantees. She gave herself a year to make something happen. If she failed, then she would beat a path back to Morgantown.
“School was the fallback plan. I was going to pour everything into country music first, because I couldn’t imagine a career doing anything else.”
The West Virginia that Kathy Mattea grew up in was blue collar, pro-union, and heavily reliant on coal. There was an underdog mentality that permeated the state, one that went back generations. It’s a mentality that still exists today. I know because, like Kathy Mattea, I am a West Virginian. Since the 35th state was formed, we’ve largely let outsiders, folks who don’t know Charleston from Charles Town, define us. Their rube jokes and unrelenting focus on the state’s most impoverished and uneducated has somehow trumped its knee-buckling beauty, neighborly people, and singular history.
Kathy Mattea grew up the antithesis of West Virginia’s hillbilly stereotype – middle class, cultured, whip-smart – and yet she’s endured the slights her whole life. There’s a defensiveness that bounds West Virginians together, and Mattea is no exception to the rule. She’s proud of her state. That’s one reason she’s been a longtime supporter of Mountain Stage.
“It’s part of my DNA at this point,” Mattea says with the laugh. “It’s like a second home.”
Conceived by Larry Groce in 1983, Mountain Stage is a two-hour radio show produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed worldwide by National Public Radio. In 1989, when R.E.M. was one of the biggest bands on the planet, it only gave three performances to promote its Out of Time LP, and one of those was on Mountain Stage. (Saturday Night Live and MTV Unplugged being the other two.) That’s right. Michael Stipe, Peter Buck & Co. rolled into Charleston and performed on Mountain Stage when it was refusing to play anywhere else.
“Mountain Stage is a great advertisement for our state,” Mattea says. “Larry is such an ambassador. I’ve been connected to the show for a long time, and I’m very proud of that relationship.”
Mattea and Mountain Stage go hand-in-hand like coal mining and West Virginia, topics that are never far from her mind. She knows full well the labor strife and economic struggles of her home state, including some of its most infamous moments.
“Who can grow up in the southern part of the state and not know about Matewan?” she asks rhetorically. “What happened there was so sensational that they eventually made a movie about it. The Matewan Chief of Police was a man named Sid Hatfield, whose family was one-half of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. It was a pretty big deal.”
The Matewan Massacre, on May 19, 1920, had all the elements of a high-noon showdown: On one side, the heroes, a pro-union sheriff and mayor; on the other, the dastardly henchmen of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Within 15 minutes, ten people were dead – seven detectives, two miners and the mayor. Three months later, the conflict in the West Virginia coal town had escalated to the point where martial law was declared and federal troops had to intervene.
The granddaughter of two West Virginia miners, Mattea grew up hearing her family’s own stories; of strikes, of picket lines, of miners being paid in scrip that could only be exchanged in the company stores owned by the employers. Years later, horrified by the 2006 explosion and collapse at the Sago mine that left 12 miners dead, she produced one of her most ambitious albums, the 2008 masterpiece, Coal.
“That album really changed my life in a lot of ways,” Mattea says. “There was so much I didn’t know until I started asking questions. Trust me, I paid attention to the retelling of those family stories that I might not have listened to when I was younger.”
The reception for Coal was resounding, both critically and personally. It garnered Mattea a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Folk Album.
“I had to get out of the way and let the songs tell the story. Once I did that, everything flowed.”
Kathy Mattea has always been smart.
From a young age, her mind operated on a different level than the other kids in her school. She comprehended words more quickly, and her mathematical problem solving was well ahead of others her age. In fact, she was double-promoted in an effort to keep her engaged. As she got older, Mattea found it harder to find things in common with the other kids. It wasn’t until she discovered music that she felt like she belonged.
“The music kids became my tribe,” Mattea says.
Her guitar became the great equalizer, the thing that stripped away all of the insecurities and bridged the gap between a young Kathy Mattea and everyone else. She also got into local theatre, another place that felt like home. Standing onstage, free from the pressure of having to hold a conversation about something she had no interest in, Mattea could let her guard down and simply be herself.
“It was liberating. I felt at home on a stage. I guess that’s one reason I was so driven to pursue music.”
Mattea enrolled at WVU as a physics, chemistry, and engineering major, but by then music was her world. She joined a bluegrass band, wrote some songs, recorded some demos, and dreamed of making it big in Nashville. When the co-writer in the band decided to make that leap, Mattea followed suit, dropping out of school against her parent’s wishes.
“To them, I was giving up a sure thing,” Mattea says. “I was sacrificing my future to take a shot at something that, in their minds, wasn’t going to work out. There were more than a few conversations over that decision.”
Mattea made the move anyway. Got that job as a tour guide. Cut demos with her writing partner. Eventually, it was that partner, Mickey, who grew disenchanted with the whole Nashville scene and went back to school.
Mattea stuck it out.
“Mickey leaving meant that I was on my own in every way,” she says. “It forced me to commit on a whole other level.”
Mattea started having voice problems, so she quit giving tours and took a desk job with an insurance company. Eventually, a record producer named Bryon Hill discovered her, and Mercury Records signed her to a contract. On March 22, 1984, her self-titled debut album was released. Five years to the day after Mattea rolled into town with a mattress strapped to the top of her car, she released her first record.
“It was a huge deal,” Mattea says. Street Talk eventually reached No. 25 on the Hot Country Songs charts. “It was an unbelievable feeling to turn on the radio and hear my song being played.”
Her second album, From My Heart, was released in 1985. It produced the chart singles It’s Your Reputation Talkin’, He Won’t Give In, and Heart of the Country, which peaked at numbers 34, 22, and 46, respectively.
“It was exciting and frustrating at the same time,” Mattea says. “I had a record deal, I was getting air play, but I didn’t have that hit song to get over the hump.”
That was about to change.
Mattea’s third album, 1986’s Walk the Way the Wind Blows, was a critical and commercial breakthrough. Four singles were released from the album, and all for reached the top 10 of the country music charts between 1986 and 1987: Love at the Five and Dime, Walk the Way the Wind Blows, You’re the Power, and Train of Memories. One of the songs – Walk the Way the Wind Blows – earned Mattea her first Grammy nomination, for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.
“The Grammy nomination was flattering, and a great, great honor,” she says. “More than anything, it helped to validate everything about my decision to pursue a music career in the first place. I felt like I belonged.”
On the heels of that Grammy nom came Mattea’s fourth album, Untasted Honey, and with it, her first No. 1 single, Goin’ Gone. The follow-up single, Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses, which is about a truck driver named Charlie who is retiring after thirty years to spend more time with his wife, also climbed to No. 1. Untold Stories and Life as We Knew It were also released from the album, with both reaching the No. 4 position on the country charts. Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses earned Mattea multiple awards, including the 1988 Academy of Country Music Awards’ Single of the Year and Song of the Year.
Kathy Mattea had not only gotten over the hump, she was suddenly a bona fide country music star.
“An overnight success years in the making,” she says with a laugh. “I was suddenly famous, and taking that big ride. You always imagine what that might be like, but then it happens and you’re trying to figure things out on the fly. It was a crazy time.”
Something even more profound happened in Mattea’s life around this time: On February 14, 1988, she married songwriter Jon Vezner. The pair had met when Mattea was living upstairs at Wrensong, Vezner’s publisher at the time. He’d see her in the hallway on occasion. One morning Mattea’s car battery was dead, so Vezner played the role of good Samaritan and jumped her. The two have been together ever since.
In 1989, Mattea released her fifth album, Willow in the Wind. The first two singles, Come from the Heart and Burnin’ Old Memories, also topped the country charts, but it was Vezner’s incredibly personal, deeply poignant Where’ve You Been that earned Mattea her first Grammy Award, this for Best Female Country Performance. Where’ve You Been also took home the 1989 Academy of Country Music Awards’ Song of the Year honors. A red-hot Kathy Mattea also won the first of back-to-back CMA Female Vocalist of the Year awards. A year later, her compilation album, A Collection of Hits, was certified platinum. The brainy, ballsy girl from Cross Lanes had conquered the country music world.
“That period in my life was a whirlwind. Things happen so fast, and everything is so surreal. You know it’s not going to last forever. You try your best to enjoy the ride.”
Her 1991 album, Time Passes By, proved to be Mattea’s most-daring, least-commercial work, a collection of songs that celebrates her many musical influences, from bluegrass of West Virginia to folk music of Scotland, where she traveled to record with heralded Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean. Coming off the immense success of the previous two years, Mattea easily could have played it safe and stayed within Nashville’s accepted parameters. By cutting Time Passes By, she made a bold statement about refusing to stagnate, and proved she was willing to make the ultimate career gamble – that the same country establishment that embraced her might just as quickly discard her.
“I’m very proud of that album,” Mattea says, reflecting on the critical reception it received. “There was a real honesty about Dougie’s music that inspired me. I didn’t worry about making a commercial album, or trying to duplicate an album that I’d already made.”
Despite the lack of radio-ready songs, Time Passes By became her third gold album. Her next two albums, Lonesome Standard Time (1992), and Walking Away a Winner (1994) were also certified RIAA gold.
“It was a good run. Looking back now, I think I appreciate it more than when I was actually charting and winning awards. Time has a way of changing perspective.”
Kathy Mattea has battled through her share of adversity since that rocket ship ride to the pinnacle of her profession. In June, 1992, Mattea was required to undergo surgery on her vocal cords. She bounced back two years later with her first Christmas album, Good News, which won the Grammy Award for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album. The joy was short-lived; Mattea frequently found herself at odds with her mother, who seemed inexplicably hellbent on making her life miserable. Little did realize the darkness slowly unfolding.
“My mom, at the height of my career, told me I’d changed, and basically did everything but disown me,” Mattea says. “It wasn’t a public thing. There was so much anger when I would come home to visit. It turns out that it was an early sign of Alzheimer’s. It cut me to my knees, but I just kept going. I was working harder than ever, and I wasn’t taking care of myself. My voice paid the price.”
Mattea’s majestic voice – a rich, husky alto/mezzo-soprano with great depth, range and shading – betrayed her. She continued to make records, but Nashville, much like her voice, had also started to change. As the ‘90s wound down, so did Mattea’s commercial clout.
“There was a time when I wondered what might have been, but I quickly let that go,” she says. “I’ve said that the circumstances of your life are just window dressing. It’s really what you do with them that matters. I think that’s how we really find ourselves.”
Mattea’s albums continued to be critically acclaimed, including 2000’s The Innocent Years, made at a time she was facing the declining health of her father, a supervisor at Monsanto Company. His passing from cancer in 2003 was another blow.
“Life can be cruel,” she says. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what’s important to me, which in turn shaped that album.”
In 2008, Mattea released Coal, followed by 2012’s Calling Me Home, but by then her voice had started to change. Six years would pass before the release of 2018’s Pretty Bird. She was on the verge of 60, and at a crossroads. Still allergic to bullshit, Mattea kept things real with herself.
“I was out on the road playing, and I’d go up for a note that I know how to hit, but it wouldn’t come out. There were some ugly cry days in my living room, because I was so frustrated. I didn’t want to leave music – trust me, I wasn’t ready to leave – but I wasn’t going to do it halfway.”
With the support of her longtime guitarist, Bill Cooley, and the help of a vocal coach, Mattea was slowly able to climb out of the darkness. Tony Bennett even offered advice. On Pretty Bird, Mattea’s new range and maturity is on full display. She sings the Hazel Dickens title song a cappella, with a kind of deep richness only time can provide.
“My voice is different than it was before, but I’ve learned that that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” she says. “Being on the other side feels great.”
Turns out Kathy Mattea had it wrong all along.
Yes, she would still do it all over again, because she would still need to know. And no, she wouldn’t change a thing, not one iota, not with the way her career has played out. She’s an icon now, and a country music legend, all thanks to a whole lotta talent and a little bit of luck. She’s sold a boatload of records. She’s played countless shows. She has money in the bank and fans worldwide, both blessings in their own way, but those are simply the byproducts of her ambition. She was never in it for the fortune, never in it for the fame. That was true back then. It’s still true today. Sure, Kathy Mattea became a star, but she could’ve lived with her own crash-and-burn, the way it has for so many others who’ve rolled into Nashville with a guitar stashed in the trunk of a car and a mattress strapped to the roof. Had Kathy Mattea failed, so what? She would have gone back to school. She might have become an engineer, or a chemist, or a theoretical physicist, even. Maybe even gotten a job at Monsanto, following in her father’s footsteps. That would have been fine, too. A roll of the dice, this thing called life. Bottom line, she had to try. She needed to know.
How, exactly, did Kathy Mattea get it wrong?
Knowing is one thing. Realization is another. Prescient moments and gut instinct led her to Nashville, but the real joy is always in the journey, not the destination. It’s about the Bill Cooleys, the Larry Groces, the Tim O’Briens. It’s about failing and trying again, falling and getting back up. Kathy Mattea knows this now. The 19-year-old using her guitar as a divining rod? There was still so much in her life yet to unfurl. You have to experience life to fully appreciate the trick of time, to understand that you’re not going to live forever, and that life – whether you’re a country music superstar or a chemistry teacher at George Washington High School – is all about the little moments along the way, and the memories you make. There has been plenty of laughter in Kathy Mattea’s life, some tears and sadness, too.
She climbed the mountain because she needed to know.
She loves the mountains because they’re who she is.
For Kathy Mattea, West Virginia will always be home.
The year 2020 has been like no other. Take me back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
We live in uncertain times because of COVID, but the initial outbreak was surreal. In March and April, the numbers were still going up. Tennessee was trying to reopen, but most of the densely populated counties were still closed. It was very hard on everyone, and still is, like it has been everywhere. One of my dear friends runs the mall near where I live, and she had to work at the mall the next county over because she couldn’t open. Nashville comprises both the city and the county because they’re the same jurisdiction, and the mayor was on the television providing daily updates and reminding everyone to hunker down.
The pandemic has hit the economy hard, the arts especially so.
I don’t think it’s going to be ‘normal’ here in Nashville for a long time. We’re slowly getting back to performing again, with a few dates in Nashville in front a very small number of people, socially distanced, and we’ve booked dates in 2021 that we hope we can keep. We’ll see. When everything shut down in March, all of my guys would check in with each other. As the weather got warmer, we were able to sit outside, socially distanced, and have some rehearsals and jams sessions. We did do one “concert” early on, in an old house that a friend had converted into a business. It had been completely sterilized, and nobody had been in there for weeks. The four of us got together, six feet apart, and did a Facebook Live concert. That felt great.
What else have you been into since the outbreak of COVID-19?
Interestingly, we moved a few days before this all started, after 30 years in our old house. So, there hasn’t been a lack of stuff to do. The house we moved from was an older, historic house located just outside of the historic overlay, so the gentrification of that neighborhood was heartbreaking, and part of why we moved. It was quite a journey – lots of moving and cleaning and talking to the neighbors and saying goodbye. It was a rollercoaster but thankfully we’ve gotten settled into our new home.
Coal mining is such an indelible part of West Virginia. What was your story with coal?
A lot of the mines had shut down and the chemical industry had moved into the Kanawha Valley by the time my dad got out of the mines, but coal was still a big part of our family’s history. My dad grew up in Smithers, and his dad mined at Cannelton Coal. My mom grew up in Bancroft in Putnam County, and her dad mined at Plymouth Hollow. So, both of them grew up in little coal mining towns. Their fathers both had their own houses, which was a source of great pride. I heard all of their stories growing up, my mom and my dad telling me what it was like. I will forever remember the little vignettes that they told me.
You grew up in Cross Lanes, West Virginia.
We had a great neighborhood. Everybody knew everybody, and there were kids everywhere. There was a subdivision up the hill behind us, and our house was halfway between the grade school and this subdivision, so everybody would walk through our yard on the way home from school. It got to the point that my dad and the guy behind us got together and built some steps up the side of the hill, so the kids could get home a little easier. There were so many good times. We had a garden in the backyard. We would play kickball in the evenings, and we would go out after school and run around the neighborhood playing games – cops and robbers during the day, and flashlight tag at night. It was small town America. We had a big family, and we would all get together and have cookouts in the summertime. It was a great way to grow up.
What are some of your earliest childhood memories?
I was the surprise kid who came along nine years after the youngest of my two brothers, which meant that I wasn’t supposed to be around, so I changed all the plans for everybody [laughs]. When I was born it became very clear, very quick, that I was real smart. I learned the alphabet not in order, but as I saw the letters in front of me. In fact, the big family joke is that my first word was “Westinghouse” because I would sit in the high chair in our kitchen, where we had a Westinghouse stove, and I’d point and ask what the letters were. I just had this insatiable desire to know. To keep me out of their hair while they were doing homework, my brothers would give me problems to solve and words to study. By the time I got into first grade, I could read and I could do math. The teachers discovered this pretty quickly. After a month in the first grade, they did all this testing and decided to move me to second grade. Actually, I was the last person to be double-promoted in Kanawha County.
Could you sense that you were academically ahead of other kids your age?
I had this fire, really, from the time I was born, to just engage with the world. I was also kind of a misfit in school, because my brain was much quicker than all of the other kids the same age. Emotionally, I was probably a little bit behind for my age. The teachers loved me, but I could not fit in with the other kids. I couldn’t figure it out socially. It was like they all knew some secret code, or had the password, or knew the cool phrase required to be accepted, but I’d somehow been left out when that information was shared. I just couldn’t connect with the other kids.
Did you ever find your clique?
I went away to Girl Scout camp in Greenbrier County during the summer between fifth-and-sixth grade, and I discovered that if you had a guitar, then everybody gathered around and wanted to sing. You didn’t have to say anything, you didn’t have to know how to be cool, and you didn’t have to worry about fitting in. People just came to you. I became a person possessed. My parents got me a guitar that summer for my birthday – actually, they rented me a guitar from a music store because they weren’t convinced that I’d stick with it – and I started taking lessons. Once they saw how obsessed I was, they got me one for Christmas. Music was all that I cared about after that. I wound up joining the choir, as well as the junior high and high school bands. The music kids became my tribe.
Were you drawn to any other creative pursuits in high school?
I remember the year when all of the peeps in my class were turning 16, and everyone was rushing to get their driver’s licenses so that they could all get summer jobs. My mom was like, “Kathy’s going to be the only one in her circle of friends that doesn’t do this.” And while she never said it, I’m sure that she thought, “I’m going to have to be home with her all summer, so I’ve got to find something for her to do.” Somewhere around that time she saw an audition for a summer show at George Washington High School, and it was being put on by the guys who were very involved with the Charleston Light Opera Guild. I went and auditioned, and dang if I didn’t make it. It was a 10-person cast, and we did Godspell that summer. I became a theatre rat.
Please tell me about your first-ever solo performance, for a local TV show in the 10th grade. You sang a version of John Denver’s Gospel Changes.
I had these friends in high school who were a couple of years ahead of me – John Thompson and Jim Snyder, who I still keep in touch with – and they had been playing music together for years. They were involved in this little variety show on cable television. This was back when cable TV was in its fledgling stage. It was almost what you might consider to be community access television now. Anyway, they were looking for content to perform and they asked me to appear. The idea was to play and sing, and so I went to this tiny studio and did it live on the air that afternoon. I’d be surprised if 20 people saw it, but when I got back to my house in Cross Lanes the phone rang. There was a woman on the other end. She wouldn’t tell me her name, but she said that she saw me and thought that I was really, really good. She explained that she had gone into the music business a long time ago, but that it had chewed her up and spit her out. She told me that I had something special. I was on the phone with her for about 45 minutes, and when I hung up, my mother and I just looked at each other and our jaws hit the floor. That kind of feedback became a theme: By the time I’d decided to quit college and move to Nashville, several things like that had happened to me, so I finally thought to myself, “Okay, you’ve got something that people are connecting with.” That’s when I made the decision to make the move.
You went to college at West Virginia University. Did you have a music career on your mind when you got there?
By the time I’d gotten into college, I had been playing guitar anywhere that I could. There was a folk group in my church and I did that. There was all of the community theater stuff, and I did that. There were the school plays and musicals at Nitro High School, and I did all of that stuff. Then I go to college and find these guys who were as eaten up about music as I was, and I started hanging out with them. We started writing songs and jamming. That’s when I realized that I could do the math and science with no problem – I was a physics and chemistry major – but I felt different when I did music. And I was just young enough that I thought, “What would happen if I built my life around music? What if I went that route, instead of doing this thing that I’m good at but don’t care about?” That’s what launched me. And then, when I had the chance to go to Nashville, I thought to myself, “I don’t care if you make it or not, I just want to know that you tried.” That way I could have that monkey off my back, and I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering what might have been.
P. Casey Daley / The Tennessean
What was college life like for Kathy Mattea?
We put together a band while I was at WVU. It was a mix of folk and bluegrass. We wrote some songs. We made some demos and sent them off to the record companies, ceremoniously dropping them into the mailbox on High Street in Morgantown. We received so many rejection letters, most of them impersonal, but we did get a couple that had handwritten notes on the bottom. The feedback was very encouraging. I thought, “Wow. I don’t know if we’re good enough, but someone thinks something. We’ve got somebody’s attention.”
Then came the end of my sophomore year. Mickey, my main co-writer in the group, was graduating. Like me, he was really serious about music, and he decided that he was going to move to Nashville. He went down there during spring break, so I went with him and helped him scope the place out. He moved after the summer. I got a little job selling cheese at the Hickory Farms in the Mountaineer Mall.
I just can’t picture Kathy Mattea, two-time Grammy Award winner, selling cheese at a mall.
It was the mid-1970s, and people just weren’t paying top dollar for designer cheese [laughs]. The manager was very into it, and was trying to make that store best store in the region – the most sales, that sort of thing – so there was a lot of pressure. Try as I could, I just could not make cheese the center point of my life. So, the manager called and asked me to come in. I thought she was going to give me another pep talk about selling cheese. Well, I walked in and she fired me. She said, “We don’t think you are Hickory Farms material.”
I went back to the house where I lived and I got really depressed. Part of me was fine with being fired because I didn’t care about the job, but I had never, ever had anybody say that they didn’t want me or that I didn’t measure up. My roommates would go to work every day and I would just sit around the house and feel sorry for myself. I didn’t want to be doing physics and chemistry for the rest of my life. Mickey was leaving. The band was breaking up. I had a steady boyfriend for the past year, but things weren’t going well and we were on the rocks. I was in a really dark place heading into that next semester.
You dropped out of college and moved to Nashville.
I was just sitting there in despair, feeling like I was in a stuck place, when this voice came into my head that said, “If you look at this like a crisis, it will be a crisis. If you look at this like an opportunity, it will be an opportunity.” That’s when it occurred to me that I was a year younger than everybody in my class. That meant that I had a year to play with. I could go to Nashville for a year, and if it didn’t work out, then I could come back and I’d be the same age as everybody in all of my classes. More importantly, I’d have answered this nagging question about a music career, and then I could figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I suddenly got really excited. I picked up the phone and called home. I said, “Mom…Dad…school has been great, and thanks so much, but guess what? I’m going to quit, and I’m going to move to Nashville with a boy and become a songwriter.”
How did that go over with your parents?
We’re talking about Depression Era kids that grew up in coal towns, so they were not thrilled at all. The silence on the other end of the phone was deafening. I moved back to Cross Lanes before I moved to Nashville, and I spent about three weeks talking to them. They were all about the reasons they didn’t want me to do it, and I was full of answers as to why I should. They were like, “Just get your degree.” I was like, “If I stay here and get my degree, then I’ll never go because I won’t go by myself. Nashville’s too big.” Eventually, they accepted my decision, and I moved to Nashville. Mickey and I plunged right in. We played Writer’s Nights, took our tapes around, and got to know some people…but after less than a year my writing partner, said, “This isn’t for me. I want to go home. I want to go back to school.” He is now a dentist in Richmond, Virginia, and I’ve had this crazy life in Nashville.
Did you ever think that you might not succeed in Nashville?
When Mickey left, my first instinct was to go back to Cross Lanes and start getting ready for school, but then a terrible feeling came into the pit of my stomach. I thought, “If you leave because he left, then you only came because he came.” I’d wanted to do this for a very long time. Nashville was my dream. My whole life was made up of these little moments where people were like, “Kathy, you have something.”
It sounds like an enormous internal conflict.
Very much so. On one hand, it was scary because he had kind of run the show. He had done all of the research and made all of the appointments, and I was kind of his sidekick. Yet, when we would take our tapes around and play them for publishers, people would say, “Who is singing this? Is that you?” That buoyed me. But Nashville was about 500,000 people at the time, which seemed too big for me to make it on my own. Those were the moments when I’d panic and think about heading back to West Virginia. Then I would think about driving home and pulling up into the driveway, where my parents would be waiting to say, “We knew you would be back.” Then I would panic about that. Nothing felt right. I somehow convinced myself not to make a snap decision. Instead of packing up and running back home, I’d give it a month and see how I felt about it then.
How did Nashville win out?
I had started losing my voice from giving tours at the Country Music Hall of Fame, so I quit that job and got a desk job with an insurance company. The office was about a mile from my house, which was about a 20-minute walk, so I decided that I was going to walk to work and back every day. That’s what I did. As I walked, I would imagine staying in Nashville, living here on my own, and trying to find my way. Then, when I couldn’t not bear those thoughts anymore, I would flip it around and imagine going home. I’d visualize going back to school. I’d see myself moving back to Morgantown, signing up for classes, and pursuing those degrees in physics and chemistry. I would do this back-and-forth, day after day, all the way to work and all the way back home.
Then, after about three weeks of this struggle, something happened. I stopped dead in my tracks one morning on the way to work, and I said, “Kathy, you can do anything for a year. But if you stay, give it all you’ve got.” That’s when it hit me – I hadn’t really laid it all on the line. I hadn’t tried with every fiber of my being. I realized in that moment that if I really gave it everything I had for a year and failed, then I could live with the results. My whole definition of success shifted in that moment. I was no longer scared of failure. I would have peace because I wouldn’t have to wonder for the rest of my life.
It turned out to be the right decision. In 1984, you released your first album. Please tell me about landing your first record deal.
I got a call from a record company who had heard my tapes and wanted to meet with me. By then I knew enough to know that this was a good thing. I had sessions scheduled that day and was going to be singing in the studio, so they asked me to come in before the sessions. The record company – Mercury Records – was a block away from the studio on Music Row, so I stopped on my way in. When I walked in the door, the receptionist said, “Jessie from Warner Brothers called, and she wants you to call her right away.” Warner Brothers happened to be another record label that had been talking to me, and they somehow knew about this appointment with Mercury – that’s how small of a town Nashville was at that time. So, I called the A&R person at Warner Brothers and she said, “Whatever you do, you need to listen to Warner Brothers before you make your decision.”
I went ahead and had the meeting with the head of Mercury, who said that they wanted to sign me. Then, at the end of the day, the A&R person from Warner Brothers picked me up and took me for an audience with Jimmy Bowen, who was the head of that label. He wanted to know what kind of deal Mercury offered. I told him that there was a producer on staff, that I could have independent production, and that I could choose what I wanted to produce. He said, “You should take the deal. We just merged with another label, and I have to drop a bunch of artists. If they are giving you outside production, that’s a good deal for you right now. You should take it.” Jimmy Bowen was looking out for me. He had been talking to me for a while, but he knew he couldn’t sign me. He wanted to make sure that I didn’t make a mistake.
How did you celebrate?
I went and played a benefit that night and I got to say, “I got a record deal today!” That was truly a Cinderella day for me. I was going to get my shot.
Where were you the first time you heard yourself on the radio?
I knew that WFAM AM in Nashville was playing my first single. I was in my car on Music Row, a block from where I lived, and I had come to a stop at a stoplight. It was a one-way road, and there was a guy in a van on my right. My song came on the radio…and I rolled down all of the windows and cranked it up as loud as I could. The guy looked at me, and I looked at him, and then I pointed to the radio and screamed, “That’s me! That’s me on the radio!” The guy just looks at me, like, “Yeah, sure.” And then the light turned green and he just pulled out.
In late 1987 you had your first Number One hit. Where were you when you learned that Goin’ Gone was at the top of the charts?
I don’t remember where I was, but we did have a Number One party for the song. That was a thing you did back then. They still do it on Music Row today, but it’s become such a huge production. There are huge banners, big parties, and lots and lots of people. Back when Goin’ Gone reached Number One, you didn’t have all of that pomp and circumstance. We just had a little party in the studio where the song was recorded – a nondescript, old house on Music Row that my producer, Allen Reynolds, owned. Garth Brooks owns it today; ironically, Allen is probably most famous for producing Garth. Anyway, we got all the writers together, along with the people who played on that record, and we celebrated this great collaboration. There were like 10 people there. We ate cake, drank some beer, and went home.
That sounds pretty low-key for someone who just landed her first Number One hit.
I have two memories from that Number One party that are great. The first one is of the song playing in the studio control room. There’s a big outside gathering area just outside of the studio, and we had all congregated there to listen to the song. What I didn’t realize was that they had made a spoof of the song. They had added four tracks to the end of it, including a ukulele – they knew that I hated the ukulele [laughs]. I’d looked at Allen Reynolds when I started working there and I was like, “I love you pal, and I know you like the ukulele, but you’re not putting the ukulele on any of my records.” So, that was the joke – they had made this whole outro with the ukulele. At one point, it sounded like there was a big lighthouse in the harbor because there was a long and loud “honk, honk.” We all had a big laugh about it.
The other memory that I have of that day came at the end of the party. My soon-to-be husband [Jon Vezner] was there, and as everyone was trickling out, he said to Allen and me, “I want to play you something.” So, we went upstairs to Allen’s listening room, and Jon played a demo of a song he’d been working on. That song was, Where’ve You Been. I knew the story. I knew that his grandmother had said those words. It was stunning to hear it told like that. I just looked at him like, “Oh my God, you wrote this in a song.” It was such a powerful moment.
Where’ve You Been won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 1990. Can you share the backstory?
Jon had told me that story while we were dating. There’s this moment in a relationship when you get a little more serious and you start to tell each other the really important things. This was one of those times. Jon’s grandmother had gotten sick, gone to the hospital, and had fallen and broken her hip, so she had been in there for a long time. She started forgetting people’s names, and finally she wouldn’t eat, and she wouldn’t talk…she was just waiting to die. Jon wheeled his grandfather into the room that day and pulled him around the bed beside her. She looked her husband and said – not in a fragile voice, but in a tone that was kind of pissed off [laughs] – “Where’ve you been?” It was the last thing she ever said. She died a couple of weeks later. She didn’t speak anymore. She had been in a kind of dementia fog, but on that day, in that moment, her husband pulled her back to reality. Jon told me that story one night, and he just burst into tears.
That must have been an incredibly hard song for Jon to write.
Jon was in a writing session with Don Henry, the co-writer on that song, and together they were able to bring it to life. Jon said that he probably wouldn’t have been able to write it without Don, that he couldn’t have gone there without another writer sort of holding that space with him. Otherwise, he would have gotten lost in all of the emotion of it.
My mom died of Alzheimer’s years later, so my relationship with that song has really evolved over time. It’s such a cruel disease. There they are…you know them so well…you know all of their mannerisms and their quirky little personality things…and yet, they are not there. It’s really hard to watch someone you love go through something like that.
Did you think it was going to be a huge hit?
When I heard it for the first time, I thought that it was too sad to be a hit song, but word quickly spread around Nashville about how great it was, which is why I love Nashville so much – and why I feel so grateful to have moved here when I was young. Every publisher in Nashville had a cassette copy of that song on their desk. We heard story-after-story of people walking in and them going, “You need to hear this song. I don’t want to have anything to do with this song, but you just need to hear this song.”
So, there was a showcase for writers at the Bluebird Café in Nashville. It was put on by a nonprofit company that no longer exists, and they would do a show once a month at the Bluebird. They would invite people to play, and Jon was one of the writers. I was in the audience that night, and he played that song, and when he was done, there were like 10 seconds of silence…and then the place erupted into applause. People were audibly sobbing all over the room. The whole room went to pieces all at once. I thought, “Oh my God, this song…” I suddenly saw that it didn’t matter if it was sad or not. It needed to be heard. So, I went to Allen and I said, “I’m sorry, I know that we both have to approve this song, and you think it’s too sad, but I have to do it.”
Where You Been climbed into the Top Ten despite the heavy nature of the material.
We recorded it with such great musicians. Edgar Meyer, the great bass player who was a MacArthur Fellow, played on it. His dad was dying, and he came to me and said, “My dad isn’t going to live to hear this on the record. Can I have a copy to play for him, because I will never get to play on anything like this again.” Of course, we gave him a copy.
Another interesting story about that song: That night at the Bluebird, a writer got sick at the last minute and had to cancel, so they put another young writer in his place. That writer was Garth Brooks. Garth had been rejected by every record label in Nashville. There was a guy from Capitol Records in the audience that night, and he signed him on the spot. It was one of those crazy things.
Your third studio album, Walk the Way the Wind Blows, was released in 1986. It had four Top 10 hits and stamped you as a country music superstar.
I made my first record with some producers that didn’t have much experience, and we didn’t have a lot of success – a little bit, but not too much. My second album didn’t hardly do anything either, but I was fortunate to have worked on it with Allen Reynolds. That really helped point me in the right direction, even though I’d yet to make any real noise. Luckily my record company said, “Look, we don’t think you found your stride yet, but we believe in you.” So, they stuck with me, and Walk the Way the Wind Blows became the album that put me over the top.
Love at the Five and Dime became your first Top 10 record.
Mercury had decided that they were going to put out singles, and that they weren’t going to spend money on another album until we gained some traction. The original plan was to go cut two singles, a total of four songs, which meant two A-sides and two B-sides. We actually got five songs out of the session. There was a song that I really liked, but, as luck would have it, a new guy came in and took over the record company, and he really liked this other song. I looked at Allen and I was like, “What do we do? I don’t want to fight the new guy. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot and get on his bad side.” Allen said, “Just let him put out what he wants to put out, and if it doesn’t hit, then you’ll be able to say, ‘I told you so.’” So, the new guy says that Love at the Five and Dime is my hit. We put it out, and it just floated up the charts like it had a balloon attached to it. It was amazing. I still sing that song every night.
It’s a great song.
I was doing an interview with the literary guy, and he said, “Kathy, that song is an epic story told in three-and-a-half minutes. You experience the entire lifetime of these two people. I had never really thought about it like that. It was written by Nanci Griffith, and told in a way that only Nanci could tell it. As an artist, that song was lighting in a bottle. I tell my audiences that when I sing that song, it’s like putting on your favorite old pair of blue jeans, the pair that’s worn in just the right way and that you know so well.
On April 1, 2008, you released your thirteenth studio album, Coal.
When I went to make this album about coal, I went through all of the songs I could find that had been written about that life, and I listened to them for months. The process started lots of conversations with my family, and all of these little stories started stringing together into a bigger picture. Everything came into clearer focus. My cousin started telling me stories that I hadn’t heard about, like a grandfather who owned a Whipple Store. The Whipple Store was a company store, which was usually the only place in town that the miners could shop. That’s because the miners were paid in “scrip,” which was only redeemable at the company store. I wound up going up there and shooting some pictures for the album cover.
The more research I did, the more I found all of these amazing connections to coal, but the more I also felt that I’d somehow missed out on this part of our family legacy. Then, I was home shooting the album cover and driving around with my manager, and he said, “Kathy, you grew up in the shadow of coal.” And then he pointed to the stacks of the John Amos Power Plant, which is the biggest coal-fired electrical plant east of the Mississippi. That made me think about my brother, who was a dispatcher and who sent coal up and down the Ohio and Kanawha rivers to the plant. Until that moment I hadn’t thought about it like that or made that connection. Mike wasn’t a coal miner, but he was directly involved in the barges that were part of the same chain. I was so close to it that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
You’ve had a long musical relationship with a fellow West Virginian, Tim O’Brien.
I met Tim when I did Walk the Way the Wind Blows. His publisher had pitched me that song. We got to know each other and just hit it off, and then he came and played on Untold Stories, which became a big hit. Tim lived in Colorado at the time, and we would visit with him and his wife whenever we played out there. Then he moved to Nashville. He produced my most recent album, Pretty Bird, in 2018, and we’ve remained great friends over the years.
Tim is just a phenomenal musician. He’s such a great player, and so proficient on so many instruments. He’s also a great singer, and so soulful, and sings in so many different styles. He has all these different facets to him, any one of which, if you isolated them, you would say, “He’s one of the best.” I have been a champion of his for a long time. He just makes everybody sound better. That’s what I always say about Tim. I don’t think that there is anyone else that I know who is that good, and that deferential. He will meet anyone exactly where they are musically. He doesn’t have to prove anything to you, he doesn’t have to show you how good he is, he just wants to find a place where your collaboration fits. He meets you where you are. There’s not a lot of ego with Tim, especially relative to how good he is. That is just amazing to me.
Bill Cooley is another talented musician who you’ve played with for a very long time.
This past January marked 30 years that I’ve been playing with Bill. I had this guitar player named John Mock, who went on to play with the Dixie Chicks. John was leaving my band, so I was having auditions. Bill had been playing with Merle Haggard, he’d played with Reba McIntyre, and at the time he was playing with Alan Jackson. I already knew Bill because his wife made all of my clothes. She is this amazing artist, and she did all of this embroidery work and produced custom-designed clothes for me.
Well, Bill came in and auditioned, and he just blew everybody out of the water. Nobody else was even close. I never thought that he would stay this long – and neither did he. We just kept looking at each other over the years, and decided to stay together and keep going. I think I really dug in with him a little before the Coal record. We worked out all of those arrangements together – Bill is a brilliant arranger – and he has been sort of my musical guru. He’s one of my tent poles, I guess you could say. I bounce everything off of him.
As a native West Virginian, you’re very involved with Mountain Stage.
Prior to COVID, I’d been guest-hosting Mountain Stage once-a-month for the past year. In fact, I woke up at five this morning with the thought that I had to host Mountain Stage today and hadn’t done my homework. Let me tell you, there was a moment of true panic [laughs].
Mountain Stage has developed a national reputation. There’s no other show like it.
Mountain Stage is important for lots of reasons – it’s important for West Virginia, it’s important for the artists, and it’s important for the arts in general. I really want them to thrive. It’s such a great tradition. I have been involved with Larry Groce and Mountain Stage since it started, and what a privilege it has been. Stepping into Larry Groce’s shoes is a big job. It’s a lot of work, but he makes it look so easy. I performed on some of the early shows, and in 1986 I was actually a guest on the show they did at the Public Radio Programmers Conference in San Diego. That was a significant step, because that’s when they sort of made the play to go national.
Mountain Stage has been a great showcase for creativity in West Virginia.
I feel like my career arc parallels the same timespan as Mountain Stage, so it has been a real companion and a constant in my life since I started playing music. I have been on the show a bunch of times, and I love those guys. I’m constantly amazed by the vision that it took to come up with that concept and think, “People will drive to West Virginia to be on our show. We’ll show them just what it’s like to be from West Virginia, and we’ll give them that kind of hospitality. They will remember us and they will come back.” Without question, Mountain Stage accomplishes a lot. It’s not only our chance to share West Virginia culture on a national stage, but it’s also a chance to give a forum for a lot of artists who are not straight down the middle but who do very interesting and important work.
Do you think the show helps dispel the West Virginia stereotypes that are out there?
I think that Mountain Stage is a really important showcase for West Virginia, because people who aren’t from there get a feel for the friendly, quirky, community atmosphere that is so much a part of West Virginia culture. It’s our counterbalance to so many of the stereotypes that people hold who have never been there. When people come to West Virginia and they do the show, they are like, “This is great! These people are great!” And then they go back into the world and tell everyone how great the people are, and what West Virginia is really like.
Mountain Stage wouldn’t be here without Larry Groce. The two of you are great friends – I’m sure you’ve shared plenty of laughs through the years.
At Mountain Stage, one of the quirky things they do backstage is that everyone has a tiki – a little good luck charm – at their stations. Paul Flaherty, the production and stage manager, has a little bobble head doll of John Hartford, who was a master of the fiddle and the banjo. There’s a little animal of some type that sits on top of the mixing console. Larry has a rocking chair, a “Fra-Gee-Lay” lamp, which is one of those leg lamps from A Christmas Story, a Dallas Cowboys full-sized, game-worn football helmet. So, I came walking in one day and I was like, “Look guys, I love ya and I love Larry, but can we do something about that Dallas Cowboys football helmet? I live in Nashville, and I’m a Titans fan, and my ch’i will be off if I have to look at that Cowboys helmet all of the time.” Fast forward to the last time we did a live show. Paul had gone somewhere and played one of those claw crane arcade games, the kind where you put the coin in and try to grab the little prize. Well, he saw a miniature Tennessee Titans football helmet, and somehow snagged it on the first try. He gives it to me, and guess what? Now there is a miniature Tennessee Titans football helmet sitting beside Larry’s “Fra-Gee-Lay” lamp, and everything is right with the world [laughs]. They keep telling me that I’ve got to bring in my tiki. I think that Titans helmet will do just fine.
In 2011, you were inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. Please take me back.
The cool thing about it is this: Tim O’Brien inducted me, and I inducted Tim. It’s such a sweet thing to get to put into words what you think is special about someone that you love. I got inducted first, so when he presented me you could have knocked me over with a feather. I was really stunned. And so, when it came his time and they ask me to be the presenter, I couldn’t wait to tell the world what was so special about him.
The thing that surprised me most is that I’d never really thought about Hall of Fame kinds-of-things, even though I’d worked as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. I’d always just gone about my business and did my deal. I was surprised by how completely overflowing I felt at the end of that night. It was a tremendous honor to be inducted. The first time I was there, I’d been asked to help induct Billy Edd Wheeler. It was 2007, and it was the same year that Hazel Dickens was inducted. I just remember thinking how lucky I was to be there to see these amazing artists recognized for their body of work. Just to see them brought into focus like that was very inspiring. If there had been something like that when I was a kid, then I might have turned towards music earlier or in a different way.
Final Question: If you had one piece of advice for the next Kathy Mattea, what would that be?
Two things: First, don’t stop writing songs, no matter what, because I did. When I got to Nashville, I thought that I was far more advanced as a singer than I was as a songwriter. So I invested in my strengths. My manager at the time kept saying, “Kathy, go take voice lessons, invest in your voice, but don’t stop writing. You will never regret it if you don’t stop writing. You always be glad you did.” Looking back, I think that I could have been one of the great songwriters. I think that I gave up on it too soon. That is my one big regret.
The other thing would be to pursue your dream with total commitment. That doesn’t mean it will work out the way you hope. I didn’t know if I’d succeed when I moved to Nashville, or if I’d end up back in school studying physics and chemistry. I just knew that I could look back after giving it my all and be happy with the result. I’m very happy with the way my life has turned out.