goTriad.com

Kathy Mattea never planned for coal to become the focus of her life. But over the past couple of years she realized that all of her paths were leading her to holes in the ground –– or to the scarred peaks of mountains.

“Suddenly everything in my life revolves around that black rock,” Mattea, 49, said during a recent telephone interview.

This weekend she will appear at Shakori Hills in Chatham County, hosting and singing at the first annual Mountain Aid Festival 2009, to raise awareness about Mountain Top Removal. The festival is aimed in part at helping wean North Carolina off coal acquired from mountaintop removal. It’s also a fundraiser to help build a new school to replace the current Marsh Fork Elementary in Raleigh County, W.Va., which lies below a 2.8 billion-gallon coal-sludge impoundment.

The coal connections started coming together in 2006 for the veteran country singer, whose hits over the past 25 years include “Love at the Five and Dime,” “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses” and “Burnin’ Old Memories.” The Sago coal mine disaster in her native West Virginia had Mattea riveted to TV news reports about 13 trapped miners, just as she and her parents had been during the Fairmont mine disaster in 1968.

“Our household would stop to watch the news every night,” she said. “This was during the Vietnam War, but this mine explosion was the lead story on the national news every night . You know it’s something big when West Virginia is leading the national news.”While the Mattea family didn’t have any friends or relatives in the Fairmont mine, they still felt a personal connection to the disaster that ultimately claimed 78 lives. Both of the singer’s grandfathers had made a living in the coal pits.

“What I remember was the look on my parents’ faces watching this,” she said. “I remember the tension in my house –– everybody was just a little edgier.

“Both of my parents had watched their dads go into the mines every day, and they had lost friends and relatives and community members. They were reliving a lot of their own experience. And I got a very clear picture of the gravity and grief of that from just being in my own household. I think when Sago happened, it took me back to that.”

The Sago disaster claimed the lives of all but one of the trapped miners. The accident gave focus to a vague idea that Mattea had toyed with for years. Her 17th album is called simply, “Coal,” and it’s a spare, haunting effort full of songs about mining by a variety of songwriters, from Merle Travis and Billy Edd Wheeler on the country end of the scale to folk legends Jean Ritchie and Hazel Dickens.

“I had a short list of tunes for that record, but I wasn’t sure it would really be a record,” Mattea said. “Your mind just sort of plays with ideas. I messed around with ideas about West Virginia, mountains, coal, homesickness or something. When the Sago mine disaster happened, I felt a lot of grief during that time. I realized that this idea I had been kind of nursing might be a great way to process some of that grief.”

Country star Marty Stuart produced “Coal” for Mattea. He started playing professionally with bluegrass legend Lester Flatt at age 13, and Mattea has great respect for his deep roots in hillbilly music.“I was afraid the songs would sound smarmy or loungey,” she said. “I knew if Marty told me I sounded good on this stuff, I knew I could trust him. And I knew he would tell me if I didn’t, and that was the biggest gift to me.”

Mattea was one of the first country music stars to speak out publicly about the AIDS epidemic, and her activist bent now has her committed to working against global warming and imagining a future for coal country beyond that black rock. In recent years, she has studied nonviolent conflict resolution, trained with former Vice President Al Gore to make public presentations based on his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and spoken out against coal extraction by mountaintop removal.

“The 'Coal’ record was very personal,” Mattea said. “I was doing that for myself.”

But then it hit her: The record and the environmental and energy issues were all of a piece.

“They all seemed kind of disconnected,” she said, “and suddenly I realized it’s all about the same thing.”

Contact Eddie Huffman at ehuffman@triad.rr.com

Newsletter

Learn More

topCars

featured ads

TriadMarketplace.com