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For the miners
Kathy Mattea's new album digs into Appalachia's heart
By Ben Salmon / The Bulletin
Published: September 21. 2007 4:00AM PST
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Kathy Mattea's new album of coal-mining songs, simply titled "Coal," is due out early next year. Mattea and other musicians were asked to sing at a memorial service for miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia in 2006.
Courtesy Kristen Barlowe
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Here’s a depressing little exercise for you to try: Hop on the Internet, visit Google Maps, and search for “Danville, W.Va.” Once you’re in Danville, click over to “Satellite” view and zoom out a little bit.
See that giant, grayish area west of town? That’s where a coal-extraction company has blown off the top of a mountain to make its job easier.
Now, zoom out more, and follow the trail of grayish spots that pockmark the rolling, green hills of the Appalachian Mountains to the southwest of Danville, extending across West Virginia and into eastern Kentucky.
Every one of those spots represents what used to be a mountain. The mountains are now flat, thanks to the extraction method known as mountaintop removal.
Coal is king in eastern Kentucky, as well as in West Virginia, where country music star Kathy Mattea grew up. Mattea, who’ll play Sunday at the Tower Theatre in Bend (see “If You Go”), is from Cross Lanes, W.Va., just outside the state capital of Charleston and about 30 miles north of that huge gray patch near Danville.
Her parents didn’t work in the mines, though her mom was a secretary for the miners’ union. But both Mattea’s grandfathers were coal miners, and in West Virginia, that’s enough.
“Even when it’s your grandparents, there’s a lot of that lore that gets passed down,” she said Monday in a telephone interview from her home in Nashville.
Even so, it wasn’t until she moved to Nashville that Mattea really began to understand the connection between the coal industry and folk music. (Even though Mattea owns two Grammys in country categories and four Country Music Association awards, her music has always been more in line with the traditions of folk.)
“When I was a tour guide at the (Country Music Hall of Fame) … in Nashville in 1978, I was 19 and I learned all this history about Nashville and country music that I didn’t know. We had old films that played every half-hour … and I would go and sit on my lunch break and watch these things,” Mattea said. “Among our treasures was this film of Merle Travis doing ‘Dark as a Dungeon.’
“That song always stuck with me, and over the years, I realized there were several songs with coal themes that I really liked, and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe someday I’ll make a record of that stuff,’” Mattea said. “And then the Sago disaster happened last year.”
The Sago disaster, you may remember, was a mine explosion that killed a dozen miners in Sago, W.Va., on Jan. 2, 2006. Mattea and several other musicians were invited to sing at a memorial service for the 12 miners, and that experience was the impetus for Mattea’s new project, “Coal,” a collection of coal-mining songs due out next year.
“We went down there and sang, and I thought, ‘Now is the time. This is all right at the forefront for me,’” she said. “It was just obvious that it was time for me to do it.”
The result is a spare, folky record of coal-mining tunes that span the second half of the 20th century. The track listing isn’t final, but “Dark as a Dungeon,” Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Coal Tattoo” and “Ballad of Lawrence Jones,” a song about a miner killed on the picket line, are possibilities.
Mattea and producer Marty Stuart recorded “Coal” in an acoustic set-up that befits the old-time nature of the songs, she said.
“The thing about this music is it really is roots music. It’s the music of a group of people expressing a way of life,” Mattea said. “It’s much more raw and connected to people living their lives. It’s not about sounding beautiful.”
At about the same time as the Sago disaster, Mattea saw Al Gore present his now-famous slideshow, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about global warming. She was so shaken by what she learned she signed up to be trained to give the presentation herself. (Since then, she has traveled across the country doing just that.)
As you might expect, her two interests soon became intertwined.
“Suddenly, every rock I turned over had coal under it,” Mattea said with a chuckle. “I got trained to do the Gore slide show, and there were references to coal and fossil fuels in that. And they encouraged us to personalize it and I wanted a picture of a (coal) strip mine. So I go looking online, and I find this slide of a mountaintop removal site in West Virginia that’s half the size of Manhattan.”
(That’s the one near Danville, by the way.)
“That opened up a whole other can of worms about mountaintop removal and what’s going on with that,” she said. “I had no clue.”
In fact, Mattea returned to West Virginia to see first-hand the effects of mountaintop removal on nearby residents. There’s a video of the trip on her Web site that shows the singer listening to story after story, often driven to tears. And there’s a clip of her stunned silence when asked to describe what she saw.
This week, she found the words.
“It’s like eco-rape, and no one knows about it. It’s a rural place. It’s remote and hard to get to. It’s sparsely populated, and there’s not a lot of industry,” Mattea said. “And coal money powers the state, but the coal companies are mostly headquartered outside the state. These coal rights were bought in the late 1800s; I have songs about that. They were bought from people who didn’t know what they were selling. So now, basically, the mineral rights of West Virginia are owned by people who are not West Virginians, but they pay for the campaigns of the people who are in office.
“It’s a very complex and challenging situation, and I’m telling you, man, people do not want to talk about it.”
As is her nature, Mattea is using her celebrity to try to educate people about mountaintop removal and effect change in a way that makes sense for both industry and individuals.
“We have to find a way to talk about the longer view, because nobody wants to change their way of life and everybody gets threatened when we start talking about this stuff,” she said. “Is there a way that we can all try to come together and listen to each other and find a long-term solution where we can all feel like we’re being heard and considered? That’s the thing I’m looking for is civil discourse about the long-term problem.”
The cause is just the latest in a long line of activism that has blossomed late in Mattea’s career. Because she had a string of hits in the late 1980s and early 1990s — including four that reached the very top of the charts — Mattea has been able to devote these last few years to projects that are, if not radio staples, perhaps more rewarding.
“I think I was really lucky with the commercial success I had, because I really didn’t feel like I was compromising artistically. It was a really special time in the music business. The door was wide open to a lot of interesting music,” she said. “When I came up, Nanci Griffith and Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett were being played on mainstream country radio. It was a real, kind of mini-Golden Era, and I feel like I got a chance to get in on it.
“At a certain point, though, you make your choice. You either chase after that, or you say, ‘Well, what do I want to do?’” Mattea continued. “I just decided that I’d had all that. I’ve got the gold records on my wall. I’ve got the Grammys and the CMA awards. Now I can go and push my own boundaries and explore my roots and collaborate with interesting people and have fun.”
Ben Salmon can be reached at 383-0377 or bsalmon@bendbulletin.com.
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