Last fall, singer Kathy Mattea had an epiphany. The West Virginia native was in a classroom at Boston’s Berklee College of Music teaching a lesson in vocal theory, when she realized that the students were hanging on to her every word.
“It was life changing,” says the musician of her experience as an artist-in-residence at the prestigious music academy. “I found out that I could really connect with these kids,” she continues. “It felt like discovering you can sing, when you never knew you could. I discovered that I could teach, and I never knew that about myself.”
The forty seven year old singer so enjoyed the experience that she’s signed on for a similar program; this one run by the folks at West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage program. This month, the two time Grammy winner will mentor young musicians at the New Song Academy in Shepherdstown. From August 23rd to 25th, Mattea will engage in three days of intensive workshops on song craft and live performance.
“I always wondered what I would have said to myself when I was twenty and just starting to make music myself,” she says from her home in Nashville. “Now I kind of get a chance to do that.”
Music was always a part of Kathy Mattea’s life. Growing up, she loved listening to records in the living room of her family home in the small town of Cross Lanes, eleven miles northwest of Charleston. Her older brothers introduced her to country and rock and roll, and her dad’s record collection introduced her to big bands and bluegrass.When Mattea started grade school, her teachers discovered that she was academically advanced. They urged her parents to keep the young girl active and engaged.
“I was quite a handful,” laughs the singer. “My mom took the advice very seriously, so I did Girl Scouts, piano lessons, singing lessons, ice skating, all kinds of stuff. The only thing that didn’t eventually get boring had to do with music.”
Despite her passion, when it came time for college, Mattea enrolled at West Virginia University to study engineering.
“I was good at math and science, and my parents really wanted me to get a degree,” she recalls.
As it turns out, Mattea didn’t get that diploma, but she did make her parents proud. The singer’s list of accomplishments includes eighteen top ten country music hits. In 1990, she won awards for Female Vocalist of the Year from the Country Music Association, and the Academy of Country Music. At the height of her fame, the musician’s parents got to see their daughter play to a crowd of about 150 thousand at the Sternwheel Regatta in Charleston.
“There were people on the bridge, in boats on the water, across the river, and all up and down the boulevard,” remembers the singer. “It was incredible.”
Ironically, Mattea’s musical career took root in college. Almost as soon as she arrived at the Morgantown campus, she joined the bluegrass band Pennsboro, and performed with them in all of her spare time. The joy she found in music easily surpassed the feelings she had for calculus. After her sophomore year at WVU, one of the singer’s band mates announced that he was moving to Nashville. He invited Mattea to join him, and she knew instantly that it would be the right choice for her.
"I knew that I would never have this opportunity again, because I would never have moved there by myself,” she explains. “I had a chance to see if I could make a life with music, and have a shot at a more interesting life.”
Despite her conviction that she was meant to pursue music, Mattea knew that breaking the news to her parents would be difficult.
“My mom just thought I was throwing my life away, and I can understand now how a parent would worry,” says the singer. “But what you couldn’t really see on the outside was that this wasn’t arbitrary for me,” she continues. “It was something I had thought about a lot, I just never really talked to anyone about it. I wasn’t running from something, I was going to something.”
Mattea returned to Cross Lanes before moving to Nashville so that she could spend time with her family, and to tell them why the decision made sense to her.
“It was a transformative time in my relationship with my folks,” she says of the visit. “It was the first time in my life that we could disagree strongly, but still respect each others opinions. Looking back, I see I was stepping into a new relationship with my parents.” In 1978, Kathy Mattea packed the car and headed to Music City, a journey she would later write about in the hit song, “Leaving West Virginia.”
Once in Nashville, Mattea worked a series of odd jobs to help pay the rent while working towards her big break. Her first gig as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame was followed by a stint as a secretary at an insurance company. Finally, she settled on a job as a waitress so she could have at flexible schedule in which to pursue session work as a back-up singer. Eventually, Mattea landed a gig singing in Bobby Goldsboro’s band. That soon led to the musician landing her own record deal. Her breakthrough album came with her third release, 1989’s “Walk the Way the Wind Blows” which produced four top ten hits.
Just the year before, Mattea had married musician Jon Vezner. The couple met when the songwriter stopped to help his future wife after her car broke down on a city street.
Mattea had a string of successful albums throughout the nineties, and with each new release she grew artistically, incorporating melodies beyond the restriction of the country music genre.
“Sometimes it can be a little frightening leaving what one knows so well. But these changes are exactly what makes you grow as an artist,” she says thoughtfully. “You hit a certain point and you know that you have a finite amount of years to make records,” she adds. “I had some records that I really wanted to get done, and I didn’t want my life to pass without doing that.”
In 2000; Kathy Mattea released “The Innocent Years,” which revealed the artist in a period of personal and professional reflection.
“My dad was struggling with cancer,” she explains. “I decided to try to share some of the human experience of growing through adulthood in the songs.”
Mattea believes she connected with people by sharing her story, and it inspired her to keep challenging herself musically. The singer knows a thing or two about taking chances, and these days her music isn’t so easy to categorize.
“I’ve always had eclectic tastes,” she notes.
On her latest CD, “Right Out of Nowhere,” Mattea is still a little bit country, but she’s also equal parts folk, blues, and rock and roll. Self produced; the project is perhaps Mattea’s most personal record to date. Her father eventually lost his battle with cancer, and last year both she and her husband lost their mothers. For years, Mattea traveled home every four to six weeks to attend to her ailing parents. She says prayer, and running along Lake Chaweva in Cross Lanes helped her cope.
“You just sort of live in crisis for years, with lots of chronic illness and helping people walk towards their death,” she remembers. “Then you have to sort of rise up and dust yourself off and kind of figure out who that has made you.”
Part of that discovery included the musician’s decision to produce for the first time in her career. It was Mattea behind the controls of “Right Out of Nowhere.”
“I’ve always had a lot to say about a project, but I’ve never had to be the person whose butt is on the line,” she notes. “Every time I would meet a producer to talk with them about the project, I kept coming up with a feeling that I was supposed to do it myself, and if I didn’t do it I would somehow regret it.”
Mattea’s most recent song was one she wrote after the Sago Mine disaster. Both of her grandfathers worked in West Virginia coal mines, and the singer wanted to pay tribute. The morning of the memorial, the musician gathered some of her friends in Nashville to perform “The Slender Threads that Bind Us.”The video was played on “The Larry King Live” show during a special episode that honored the twelve victims of the tragedy.
“Everybody was so grateful to be able to do the smallest thing to extend their hearts to these families who had been through so much,” says Mattea.
The musician still has plenty of family in the mountain state, and visits whenever she can. Her brother Joe lives near the family’s childhood home, and Mike lives just across the river. “He likes to call his house the West Virginia embassy in Ohio,” Mattea says with a laugh.
Other than her music and family, it’s her spirituality that drives the artist today. She is a voracious reader, and cites Madeline L’Engle’s “Walking on Water,” as a recent favorite.
“It’s about the creative act, and what a spiritual leap of faith it is,” says Mattea. “She talks about the tension between listening to the voice of the work that is calling out to be made, and the reality that we all want to be accepted. I’ve been absolutely terrified sometimes, but I haven’t let it keep me from doing anything I’ve wanted to do, because that is where the divine enters our lives. The fear doesn’t go way, but the divine is an antidote to it.”
“It was life changing,” says the musician of her experience as an artist-in-residence at the prestigious music academy. “I found out that I could really connect with these kids,” she continues. “It felt like discovering you can sing, when you never knew you could. I discovered that I could teach, and I never knew that about myself.”
The forty seven year old singer so enjoyed the experience that she’s signed on for a similar program; this one run by the folks at West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage program. This month, the two time Grammy winner will mentor young musicians at the New Song Academy in Shepherdstown. From August 23rd to 25th, Mattea will engage in three days of intensive workshops on song craft and live performance.
“I always wondered what I would have said to myself when I was twenty and just starting to make music myself,” she says from her home in Nashville. “Now I kind of get a chance to do that.”
Music was always a part of Kathy Mattea’s life. Growing up, she loved listening to records in the living room of her family home in the small town of Cross Lanes, eleven miles northwest of Charleston. Her older brothers introduced her to country and rock and roll, and her dad’s record collection introduced her to big bands and bluegrass.When Mattea started grade school, her teachers discovered that she was academically advanced. They urged her parents to keep the young girl active and engaged.
“I was quite a handful,” laughs the singer. “My mom took the advice very seriously, so I did Girl Scouts, piano lessons, singing lessons, ice skating, all kinds of stuff. The only thing that didn’t eventually get boring had to do with music.”
Despite her passion, when it came time for college, Mattea enrolled at West Virginia University to study engineering.
“I was good at math and science, and my parents really wanted me to get a degree,” she recalls.
As it turns out, Mattea didn’t get that diploma, but she did make her parents proud. The singer’s list of accomplishments includes eighteen top ten country music hits. In 1990, she won awards for Female Vocalist of the Year from the Country Music Association, and the Academy of Country Music. At the height of her fame, the musician’s parents got to see their daughter play to a crowd of about 150 thousand at the Sternwheel Regatta in Charleston.
“There were people on the bridge, in boats on the water, across the river, and all up and down the boulevard,” remembers the singer. “It was incredible.”
Ironically, Mattea’s musical career took root in college. Almost as soon as she arrived at the Morgantown campus, she joined the bluegrass band Pennsboro, and performed with them in all of her spare time. The joy she found in music easily surpassed the feelings she had for calculus. After her sophomore year at WVU, one of the singer’s band mates announced that he was moving to Nashville. He invited Mattea to join him, and she knew instantly that it would be the right choice for her.
"I knew that I would never have this opportunity again, because I would never have moved there by myself,” she explains. “I had a chance to see if I could make a life with music, and have a shot at a more interesting life.”
Despite her conviction that she was meant to pursue music, Mattea knew that breaking the news to her parents would be difficult.
“My mom just thought I was throwing my life away, and I can understand now how a parent would worry,” says the singer. “But what you couldn’t really see on the outside was that this wasn’t arbitrary for me,” she continues. “It was something I had thought about a lot, I just never really talked to anyone about it. I wasn’t running from something, I was going to something.”
Mattea returned to Cross Lanes before moving to Nashville so that she could spend time with her family, and to tell them why the decision made sense to her.
“It was a transformative time in my relationship with my folks,” she says of the visit. “It was the first time in my life that we could disagree strongly, but still respect each others opinions. Looking back, I see I was stepping into a new relationship with my parents.” In 1978, Kathy Mattea packed the car and headed to Music City, a journey she would later write about in the hit song, “Leaving West Virginia.”
Once in Nashville, Mattea worked a series of odd jobs to help pay the rent while working towards her big break. Her first gig as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame was followed by a stint as a secretary at an insurance company. Finally, she settled on a job as a waitress so she could have at flexible schedule in which to pursue session work as a back-up singer. Eventually, Mattea landed a gig singing in Bobby Goldsboro’s band. That soon led to the musician landing her own record deal. Her breakthrough album came with her third release, 1989’s “Walk the Way the Wind Blows” which produced four top ten hits.
Just the year before, Mattea had married musician Jon Vezner. The couple met when the songwriter stopped to help his future wife after her car broke down on a city street.
Mattea had a string of successful albums throughout the nineties, and with each new release she grew artistically, incorporating melodies beyond the restriction of the country music genre.
“Sometimes it can be a little frightening leaving what one knows so well. But these changes are exactly what makes you grow as an artist,” she says thoughtfully. “You hit a certain point and you know that you have a finite amount of years to make records,” she adds. “I had some records that I really wanted to get done, and I didn’t want my life to pass without doing that.”
In 2000; Kathy Mattea released “The Innocent Years,” which revealed the artist in a period of personal and professional reflection.
“My dad was struggling with cancer,” she explains. “I decided to try to share some of the human experience of growing through adulthood in the songs.”
Mattea believes she connected with people by sharing her story, and it inspired her to keep challenging herself musically. The singer knows a thing or two about taking chances, and these days her music isn’t so easy to categorize.
“I’ve always had eclectic tastes,” she notes.
On her latest CD, “Right Out of Nowhere,” Mattea is still a little bit country, but she’s also equal parts folk, blues, and rock and roll. Self produced; the project is perhaps Mattea’s most personal record to date. Her father eventually lost his battle with cancer, and last year both she and her husband lost their mothers. For years, Mattea traveled home every four to six weeks to attend to her ailing parents. She says prayer, and running along Lake Chaweva in Cross Lanes helped her cope.
“You just sort of live in crisis for years, with lots of chronic illness and helping people walk towards their death,” she remembers. “Then you have to sort of rise up and dust yourself off and kind of figure out who that has made you.”
Part of that discovery included the musician’s decision to produce for the first time in her career. It was Mattea behind the controls of “Right Out of Nowhere.”
“I’ve always had a lot to say about a project, but I’ve never had to be the person whose butt is on the line,” she notes. “Every time I would meet a producer to talk with them about the project, I kept coming up with a feeling that I was supposed to do it myself, and if I didn’t do it I would somehow regret it.”
Mattea’s most recent song was one she wrote after the Sago Mine disaster. Both of her grandfathers worked in West Virginia coal mines, and the singer wanted to pay tribute. The morning of the memorial, the musician gathered some of her friends in Nashville to perform “The Slender Threads that Bind Us.”The video was played on “The Larry King Live” show during a special episode that honored the twelve victims of the tragedy.
“Everybody was so grateful to be able to do the smallest thing to extend their hearts to these families who had been through so much,” says Mattea.
The musician still has plenty of family in the mountain state, and visits whenever she can. Her brother Joe lives near the family’s childhood home, and Mike lives just across the river. “He likes to call his house the West Virginia embassy in Ohio,” Mattea says with a laugh.
Other than her music and family, it’s her spirituality that drives the artist today. She is a voracious reader, and cites Madeline L’Engle’s “Walking on Water,” as a recent favorite.
“It’s about the creative act, and what a spiritual leap of faith it is,” says Mattea. “She talks about the tension between listening to the voice of the work that is calling out to be made, and the reality that we all want to be accepted. I’ve been absolutely terrified sometimes, but I haven’t let it keep me from doing anything I’ve wanted to do, because that is where the divine enters our lives. The fear doesn’t go way, but the divine is an antidote to it.”
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