Kathy Mattea
Inspiration
by Kerry Dexter

In a time when most country artists draw on pop and rock styles to enliven their music, Kathy Mattea looks to different traditions: folk, bluegrass, gospel, and Celtic music. She's recorded songs by writers such as Laurie Lewis, Claire Lynch, Pat Alger, and Don Henry, and on her latest album, The Innocent Years, has returned to songwriting herself after a long time away from the craft. Her audience is diverse in terms of age, race, and lifestyle, Mattea has observed, but she believes that they have one thing in common: "They are people who think about music, rather than just taking what the latest radio hit is that's fed out," she said. "They are people who look for inspiration from their music."

Sitting in the sun-filled kitchen of her home in a quiet Nashville neighborhood, the two- time Grammy winner reflected that, "Folk music was my door into country music, and in some ways I think I'm still more of a folk artist than a country artist. That really is where it all began for me, sitting around in a circle with my friends and my guitar, playing music, sharing songs back and forth. I could do that for hours," she said, her voice brimming with enthusiasm. "I could do that for days!"

Growing up in West Virginia, Mattea said, "I was sort of this whiz kid — I knew how to do math and how to read before I got to school, just by asking questions — 'What's that?' 'What's that?' you know, so you can imagine what kind of kid I was," she recalled, laughing. "When my mother took me up to the school she said what do I do with her? and the people at the school said keep her interested, don't let her get bored. So she put me in everything, Girl Scouts, ice skating, community theater, music. And music was the one thing that stuck. I never got bored with music — there was always so much to learn." Once she discovered that, the singer recalled, "I was just like a sponge. I listened to anything I could get my hands on. My father had big-band records, I joined the folk group for masses at church, I jammed with a friend of mine's father's bluegrass band after school, I got involved in community theater so I was doing Broadway stuff, and my brother was listening to Big Brother and the Holding Company and to James Taylor, so I heard those records, too." She learned piano and guitar, and found that "the music I always came back to, my music that I'd make for myself, was folk music. Just sitting around with my friends playing things on my guitar."

That place of sharing acoustic music with friends is a source of strength Mattea has turned to several times in her career, most recently during the three years between her last record, Love Travels, and the May release of The Innocent Years. "My mother, who had never taken a pill in her life, got very sick," Mattea recalled. "When that happened, I knew I had to make some space, clear some time for me to deal with that and help her. So we did an all-acoustic tour, let go the truck and the extra stuff, and stripped things down, boiled what I do down to its essence. We did the shows just sitting on stools in a semicircle onstage. It was very inspirational," the singer recalled.

She'd find herself in need of that inspiration. With her mother's health on the mend, she returned to the studio only to find her record company sold and her contract, and the album, on hold in corporate limbo for several months.

When she finally began to record again, she received the news that her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given only a few months to live. Mattea journeyed back to West Virginia. While other family members handled finances and medical information ("Our family is great like that — we just circled the wagons," she said), it became Mattea's task to "sit up late at night with him with a legal pad, hearing the stories, everything from the bank accounts nobody knows about to who's gonna change the oil in the car for Mom, to who's gonna hose off the patio in the spring — all that stuff. When you sit with someone who literally has death sitting on their shoulder and help them process their life, listen to their life stories," she said, "and try to take that burden off of them, it can't help but change the way you see your own life." And in Mattea's case, her music as well.

This is an excerpt from issue #91.