{"id":985,"date":"2012-11-08T14:54:30","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T14:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=985"},"modified":"2012-11-11T18:49:54","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T18:49:54","slug":"kathy-matteas-coal-journey-back-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=985","title":{"rendered":"Kathy Mattea’s “Coal Journey” Back Home"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cCoal kills.\u201d Or can it possibly be \u201cclean\u201d?<\/p>\n

The presidential candidates debated the issue because coal remains central to our traditional energy production, which now contributes greatly to pollution, damaging of the ozone layer, and the human toll on those who work in the industry.<\/p>\n

We know\u00a0continued reliance on such carbon-based energy will be environmentally devastating. You don’t need to be trapped in a suffocating coal mine to feel the heat. As the earth\u2019s ozone layer erodes further, exposing us to the sun\u2019s ultraviolet rays, we\u2019ve just experienced the warmest 12 months — from July 2011 to July 2012 — in US history, the worst Midwest drought in decades, and an increasingly bizarre — but explainable — profusion of extreme weather events, like Hurricane Sandy.<\/p>\n

Daughter of a miner\u00a0family, Kathy Mattea took a big step toward raising awareness of \u00a0coal mining\u2019s most pressing issues in her brilliantly provocative 2008 album Coal <\/em>( Captain Potato Records).<\/p>\n

Her new CD, Calling Me Home,<\/em> finds her back on a larger label (Sugar Hill)\u00a0and perhaps expanding her audience reach, with more artful symbolism than\u00a0death-rattle spookiness.<\/p>\n

But she’s still fearless. \u201cMaple\u2019s Lament\u201d has a dead tree as its narrator. \u201cHello, My Name is Coal\u201d wittily encapsulates the industry\u2019s political paradoxes. http H\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Zrm1rPa3mLI<\/a>\u00a0\u201cBlack Water\u201d depicts a mountain’s decapitation and living among coal-poisoned streams.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Black Waters\u2019 was written in 1970 or \u201971, and it is so valid right now,” Mattea says. “I mean, people are living that story right now. I love that it clearly articulates that experience and also that, inadvertently, it articulates how little has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 1992, nearly 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been filled by mining wastes at the rate 120 milies per year, according to the to Environmental Protection Agency.1<\/p>\n

Mattea\u2019s alto voice — a stalwart beauty — employs the witness of pioneering Appalachian songwriters like Hazel Dickens and Jean Ritchie, with luminous harmonizers like Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Patty Loveless.<\/p>\n

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver who, like Mattea is Appalachian-born, provides finely tuned liner notes: \u201cThe particular genius of Kathy Mattea\u00a0is to call up the touchstones of hope and heartbreak that we all carry their pockets even if these mountains are not yours, the fact is everybody has a homestretch, where you feel little torn up because no matter which way you’re headed, you’re going towards home and also leaving it behind,\u201d she writes. \u201cBelieve me, this is the soundtrack for that journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kingsolver\u00a0pinpoints the universal chord that Mattea\u00a0has struck on this recording. Politically loaded as the topic of coal is, the experience of home is nonpartisan, so Mattea\u00a0appeals to our sense of what is worth preserving because it is an essential part of us — the shoe mud on rainy-day walks, childhood sing-alongs,\u00a0dinner aromas in the kitchen, cheating at game playing,\u00a0fraught holiday gatherings, crazy laughter, petty jealousies, preciously shared memories, secrets and shame and\u00a0intense pride and gratitude.
\n\u201cI hope my relationship to the song and the story deepens,\u201d Mattea says in a promotional video on our website. \u201c(The album) Coal<\/em>\u00a0was like discovering the music I was meant to sing all my life but I had missed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she transports us to Appalachia and makes it feel an awful lot like our own home — even if you’ve never been there.<\/p>\n

I finally drove into that near-mythical and misunderstood region in June, and its stately mountains and open-armed valleys infiltrated my being in a way I hadn\u2019t expected.<\/p>\n

So when I arrived with my sister Sheila at the Blue Plum Music and Arts Festival in Johnson City*<\/strong> at the eastern tip of Tennessee, I was primed for artists like Guy Clark, Darrell Scott and Malcolm Holcombe, with comparable ability to press on the pulse of the American home experience wherever it may lie (I\u2019ve blogging on all three artists on this site).<\/p>\n

\u201cAppalachia is one of the last places in our country and maybe on the planet where people are this attached to where they live,\u201d Mattea muses. \u201cThis is just our spot in the world. It’s one of the best places that has its own flavor. I think as I get older and as the culture changes, I realize how special it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

The centerfold photograph of the liner booklet for Calling Me Home, <\/em>Mattea sits before a stunning backdrop: a river winding through golden-green mountainsides.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Kathy Mattea in Appalachia. Sugar Hill label CD photographs by David McLister\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet \u201cMaple\u2019s Lament,\u201d a song by Laurie Lewis, zooms the focus down to a single tree, even if it is too late:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was alive the birds would nest upon my boughs<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0And all through long winter nights, the storms would \u2018round me howl\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

But now that I’m dead, birds no longer sing in me<\/em><\/p>\n

and I feel no more the wind and rain, as when I was a tree.<\/em><\/p>\n

But bound so tight with wire strings, I have no room to grow<\/em><\/p>\n

And I am but the slave who sings, when master draws the bow\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

One wonders what today’s climate-change deniers think kills such maples. Other “trees and plants,” as Ronald Reagan infamously blamed for air pollution?<\/p>\n

Many of Mattea\u2019s male relatives labored for years in the coal mines and paid the price, with black lung disease, or far more sudden death.<\/p>\n

An old friend lay on his dying bed<\/em><\/p>\n

held my hand to his bony breast<\/em><\/p>\n

And he whispered low as I bent my head<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, they\u2019re calling me home<\/em><\/p>\n

They’re calling me home<\/em><\/p>\n

(from \u201cCalling Me Home\u201d by Alice Gerrard).<\/p>\n

Here, as elsewhere, Mattea\u2019s voice uncovers layers of emotional depth while always radiating a resolute fortitude that never succumbs to easy sentimentality.<\/p>\n

And her focus on her home state of West Virginia underscores the economic reality people there live with — of losing jobs as well as their lives, and the fact that industry and political forces an Appalachia resist diversifying solutions to the inevitable decline of this non-renewable resource, which is coming closer to being tapped out in the region, according to Ken Ward Jr. in a recent article in The Nation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The activist group coal River Mountain Watch and the consulting firm Downstream Strategies have suggested that building wind\u00a0energy farms on some Appalachian peaks is the better long-term goal than “blowin’ ’em up\u00a0real good”\u00a0to get at the coal.\u00a0 During my drive to Tennessee, I was captivated by\u00a0a huge\u00a0wind farm in Indiana with hundreds of\u00a0turbines spinning beside the highway. How much more elegant\u00a0and ecological would be one of these slender white turbines atop a blue ridge mountain, to make use of, and do justice to, its splendid height?<\/p>\n

Throughout the album, Mattea\u00a0and her guest harmonizers ride the supple, glimmering accompaniment of ace contemporary bluegrass musicians, including Stuart Duncan, Bryan Sutton and Bill Cooley, who penned \u201cRequiem for a Mountain,\u201d the instrumental which quietly closes the album with pure sonic vibrations rather than words, like whispering zephyrs and murmuring rivulets mourning the defiled majesty of yet another\u00a0decapitated peak.<\/p>\n

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In this photo\/graphic,\u00a0a decapitated Appalachian mountain has produced\u00a0a lake of toxic coal sludge which hovers over a precariously close elementary school. Courtesy of the blog After Gutenburg: Just Another Pretty Face.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

So Mattea\u00a0is growing more sophisticated in her rhetorical skills as an artist.\u00a0Though she\u00a0now lives in Nashville and is a two-time Grammy winner,\u00a0she’s hardly a typical peroxided country star.\u00a0Coal<\/em> was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Traditional Folk category. Her cover of Nanci Griffith<\/a>‘s “Love at the Five and Dime” was her first major hit in 1986,\u00a0(and\u00a0earned the just-emerging Texas alt-country Griffith notice as a songwriter). Unsurpisingly,\u00a0Mattea’s an\u00a0environmental activist. She currently travels the country presenting Al Gore<\/a>‘s renowned and still provocative environmental film An Inconvenient Truth<\/em><\/a> and speaking about the importance of fighting global warming and the environmental and physical devastation of mountaintop-removal coal mining.<\/p>\n

What might be her political preferences? We know Mitt Romney \u201clikes coal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mattea clearly prefers whole, thriving Appalachian mountain ecosystems and humans.<\/p>\n

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*Mattea\u2019s next advocacy speaking apperance will be in Johnson City, TN on November 12 at\u00a0“The Arts: Remembering Who We Are” Artists-In-Education conference at East Tennessee University-Millennium.<\/p>\n

She has a Facebook page dedicated to her cause: https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/home.php#!\/kathymattea.mycoaljourney?fref=ts<\/a><\/p>\n

1 http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/170484\/myth-war-coal<\/a><\/p>\n

2 http:\/\/jcwinnie.biz\/wordpress\/?p=5278&cpage=1\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

A shorter version of this review was published in The Shepherd Express <\/em> on November 8<\/strong><\/p>\n

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