Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal

Kathy Mattea: A Light in the Dark

kathy mattea A Light in the Dark The green rolling hills of West Virginia Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know Though the times are sad and drear And I cannot linger here They’ll keep me and never let me go —Utah Phillips, “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” “There’s a certain point in Eastern Kentucky, on I-64, when I’m driving home, where the mountains start to rise. Every time I hit it, still I feel it, it’s way down deep, and something just lets go,” Kathy Mattea says. “As I get closer and closer to home the horizon gets closer and closer until I can only see right around the bend, and that feels real safe to me, being nestled in like that. Home, in the mountains.” Mattea is a beloved, Grammy-winning singer who spent the last decade of the twentieth century as one of country music’s most dependable and most respected hit-makers. Her songs are the kind that people know all the words to and sing along with when they come on the radio: “Eighteen Wheels (and a Dozen Roses),” “Where’ve You Been,” “Walk the Way the Wind Blows.” Mattea’s personality has helped sell her records. People don’t like just to hear her sing, they want to be her friend, too. In the new century, Mattea is emerging as one of the genre’s most influential voices. She’s also quickly becoming one of the more visible Appalachians involved in the fight against mountaintop removal. Mattea has had the chance to talk about the issue a lot lately, because she’s appeared in the papers frequently these days with kathy mattea, huntington,Westvirginia. Photo by James minchin. kAthy mAttEA 11 the release of her latest album, Coal, one of the best-reviewed records of the year, in country or any other genre. Coal showcases Mattea at the height of her powers as a singer. In covering classic coal-mining songs like Jean Ritchie’s “The Blue Diamond Mines” and “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” Hazel Dickens’s “Black Lung,” Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Red-Winged Blackbird” and “The Coming of the Roads,” and many others, Mattea has achieved something new in her already remarkable career. She has not only produced what might just be her best album to date, she’s also returned in music to the home she speaks of with such eloquence, the Appalachia that she left physically when she was nineteen years old, but that she never left spiritually. “This record reached out and took me. It called to me to be made. That’s a different experience. It’s like ‘If not now, when?’ and ‘If not you, then who?’ Nobody said that to me and I didn’t think that, but you go through your life and you try to be open, you try to think how can I be of service, how can my gifts best be used in the world?” Mattea says, seated at the dining table of her Nashville home, which is simple and modest by the standards of entertainers of her stature. “If you ask that question every day, you find yourself at the center of something.” Mattea has found herself not only at the center of music at its highest power (“These songs provide a voice for a whole group of people, a place, a way of life. And that’s a sacred use of music,” she says), but also at the center of a growing environmental movement. After becoming involved with Al Gore’s Climate Project, Mattea found herself learning—and talking—more about mountaintop removal. It wasn’t something that most country artists were talking about at the time. In fact, Mattea, Naomi Judd,1 and Kenny Alphin (better known as Big Kenny of the duo Big and Rich) are the only country singers, Appalachian or not, to speak publicly on the topic despite constant lobbying from anti–mountaintop removal groups, who realize how pow- SOmEthIng’S RISIng 11 erful a famous country singer’s words would be to people across the nation.2 Mattea is no stranger to stepping up to the plate when she’s needed. She was the first country singer—and one of the first mainstream artists, period—to speak out against the government for not offering better funding to AIDS research and health care...