Courtesy photo

Kathy Mattea’s new album, “Coal,” is a stripped-down, traditional sounding record inspired by the Sago Mine tragedy in 2006 and Al Gore’s independent film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Kathy Mattea — Moving Mountains

• When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
• Where: Jefferson Center, Roanoke
• Cost: $34; $28; students half-price
• Info: 345-2550, jeffcenter.org, mattea.com

Nashville, Tenn., can be a tough town, even for its superstars. Few there are immune to record label buyouts and management changes.

Kathy Mattea, who has been among country music’s biggest stars since the mid-1980s, decided she would leave the corporate machine on her own terms. In 2000, Mattea had one record left in her long-standing association with Mercury Records. The label had been bought out, and although one of her champions remained atop the company, she knew the corporate culture was changing.

Mattea felt that after all her success at Mercury, the label was sticking with her only through a sense of obligation.

“I just did some soul-searching around this, and I thought: ‘A voice is a finite thing, and I don’t know how long I’ll be singing,’” Mattea said in a phone interview last week. “And I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to singing for people who don’t want to hear me, who aren’t as excited about what I’m doing as I am.”

In a business that was chasing youth, looks and pop culture cache more than it ever had, she wanted to dig back into the music’s roots. So she asked the label to let her go. The split was amicable, she said.

“I had no idea what I was going to do,” she said. “I just jumped off a cliff. … I’m not going to be the dinosaur that’s just been here 20 years — that old girl that they have to keep. So I just left.”

Two small labels and four albums later, she has delivered “Coal,” a record honoring those who work in the mines. She’ll be performing songs from that record at Jefferson Center on Thursday night.

‘Under every rock’

An unexpected confluence of events led Mattea to “Coal,” on more than one level.
In January, 2006, a mine explosion in Sago, W.Va., trapped 13 and killed 12 miners. The same month, Mattea saw former Vice President Al Gore deliver his slide show, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mattea said she and about 1,000 other people were trained to present the slide show.

“They seemed like two completely unrelated events in my life,” Mattea said. “As I got more into this record, the record and this grass-roots service project led me to the same center point. And suddenly, it was like every rock I turned over had coal under it. I mean, everything in my life became about coal.”

It’s a stripped-down, traditional sounding record. But don’t worry, fans of “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” and “Where’ve You Been” will still hear some of the hits that made her famous, albeit with new arrangements.

“I have to say, I am so grateful for the experience,” Mattea said. “I’m grateful for the people that I got to connect with through those years, and how those songs have lived. They were songs that really have a connection with people, that still lasts till today. And singing them, they’ve lived really well. I feel really lucky to get to still do this.“

Back to the roots

Mattea remembers her first job in Nashville, before the recording and the fame. She was 19 and a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Watching old video reels of great country performances, she discovered Merle Travis’ performance of “Dark as a Dungeon.” A guitar teacher long ago had shown her how to play the Travis thumb-and-forefinger picking style, but she didn’t know anything else about the musician.

“I had a light bulb where I was like, ‘Ah, Merle Travis!’ ” she said. “ ‘Holy crap — this is the guy!’ Both my grandfathers were coal miners, and I just remember being really struck by the song, and filing it away in my mind. … I think it struck me because these were my people he was singing about.”

But it was the deadly mine explosion that inspired her to gather material for the record that would become “Coal.”

“Everybody forgets about these people, until some big disaster happens, and then everybody is like, wow, these guys under the ground — what a thing, what a way to make a living,” Mattea said. “And then we all forget about them again. But we’re all tied to them, you know, every time we flip on a light switch.”

“Dark as a Dungeon” was one of the first songs on her list, she said. “Coal” also includes songs by such writers as Jean Ritchie (“The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore”), Darrell Scott (“You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”), Hazel Dickens (“Black Lung”) and Billy Edd Wheeler (who has three songs on the record).

“People have responded to it so beautifully, and I think, my God, I’m 49 years old, and I feel like I’m just learning again how to be a singer and what it all means,” she said.

When she says “learning again,” she also means months of rehearsal. To prepare the songs, she sat with Bill Cooley, her guitarist of 20 years, over the course of six months.

“Black Lung,” in particular, was a challenge. Mattea recorded and performs the song a cappella, and said that learning and performing it left her feeling vulnerable.

“It’s like, OK, now I’m going to  take all my clothes off for you people,” she said. “It doesn’t get any more naked than that. And it is a commitment.”

Dickens, a renowned folk singer/songwriter from West Virginia, is totally emotional in performance, and Mattea said she had to find a way to connect.

“I had to get a layer of my own style out of the way and have a more visceral connection to this song,” she said. “With Hazel … there’s no self-consciousness. There’s no performance to it. She’s just being Hazel, to her toenails, and that’s part of her power. That and the fact that she doesn’t pull any punches.”

Cooley helped Mattea figure out the approach to “Black Lung,” but even in the studio, she wasn’t absolutely sure of herself.

After one particular take, she wanted to try again. Producer Marty Stuart persuaded her to come into the booth before giving it another go.

Her longtime engineer, Mick Conley, whose father had died of black lung, stood looking her in the eye, the tears streaming down his face, she said.

“And he said, ‘I think you’ve got it,’” she recalled. “He just looked at us and said, ‘I need a minute,’ and he walked out of the room.

“And Marty looked at me and said, ‘Kathy, you don’t need to do anything else, but what you just did. You’ve got to trust that.’ ”

Passion for activism

Mattea was always an activist. For example, she was one of the first Nashville artists to speak up about HIV/AIDS. So it stands to reason that her experiences working on “Coal” — which included a trip down a West Virginia mine — would lead to some activism.

She has spent some of her travel time presenting “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mattea, trained to personalize the show, includes slides showing results of mountaintop removal coal mining. And of course, she’s concerned about mine safety.

“There are environmental implications. There are social justice implications. There are economic implications, regionally and nationally,” she said. “What I’ve learned is, my home state puts all its eggs in one basket. That’s the industry in this state. So it leaves people powerless in a lot of ways, to stand up, because coal has such a monopoly in the state and has for so many generations.

“As our appetite for energy keeps growing, the implications of all of these threads get more far-reaching.”

Mattea won’t be showing the slides in Roanoke, though she noted that the Society of Environmental Journalists is meeting in Roanoke the week she’ll be here.
“A lot of these issues will be discussed,” she said.

She recently met Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen to discuss mountaintop removal — “because it’s still on the table there.”

She’s been in contact with industry, labor, environmental and consumer interests, and has learned all their points of view. A student of social change through nonviolence, Mattea said her dream is to see representatives from every point of view gather with a mediator to try to find a solution.

“If we just take opposite sides and point our fingers at each other, we’re just mirror images of each other,” she said.

“How do we find our way to a real discussion?”