Speaking only for myself, I can find it in either end of that spectrum. “There were people doing what was considered pop stuff, too, and then there were traditionalists, like Randy Travis and Lee Greenwood. “I remember this tension when I was in my heyday (in the mid ‘90s),” Mattea says. When Mattea hits the stage Sunday night at Lake Michigan College’s Mendel Center, the coal miner’s granddaughter promises to bring a blend of the traditional country style etched by Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells with an updated pop vibe laid out by today’s young country starlets that was actually introduced back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s on string-heavy country records produced by Chet Atkins. “We have to make it OK to talk to each other about AIDS if we’re going to get any results.” Today, Mattea remains one of the most active country music artists involved in HIV/AIDS-related charities and is the recipient of both the Minnie Pearl Humanitarian Award and the Harvard AIDS Institute Leadership Award. “This was a way of showing my support in a quiet way, so the CMA Awards were going to do green ribbons for environmental issues, and I wore a green and a red ribbon, as well.”Ī Nashville newspaper columnist “challenged” Mattea in print the following day, but the critical piece only fueled the singer’s drive to speak more on behalf of AIDS victims. “All these red ribbons were being worn because you couldn’t really talk about it,” she says. “I lost four different people close to me within the course of three or four years.”Īlthough the country music community lined up to hear Mattea sing, the Nashville hierarchy didn’t want to listen to an artist’s views on a disease of epidemic proportions, or watch Mattea parade at the Country Music Awards wearing a red ribbon symbolizing the fight against HIV/AIDS. 3 on the country charts and became Mattea’s first major hit.īut things were also happening during the 1980s that pulled Mattea out of the tight-lipped world of Nashville and into the realm of social consciousness. Her breakthrough record arrived in 1986 in the form of “Walk the Way the Wind Blows,” particularly the cover of Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime,” which reached No. “I got into more progressive, hipsters bluegrass,” she says, adding, “that was big when I was growing up.” “I grew up hanging out with bluegrass and new-grass artists,” Mattea says, pointing out that her strong Celtic influences evolved out of bluegrass music.

One of those, songwriter and producer Byron Hill, guided Mattea to the attention of Mercury Records head Frank Jones, who signed her to her first record deal in 1983. Two years into college, Mattea dropped out and moved to Nashville, landing a job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame while singing backup for Bobby Goldsboro and on demos for a slew of Nashville songwriters and publishers. Growing up in Cross Lanes, W.V., a suburb of Charleston, Mattea discovered her passion for singing at Girl Scout camp, then went on to West Virginia University, where she joined a bluegrass band.

Kathy mattea burnin old memories