Kathy Mattea

Among the prominent women in country music during her generation, Kathy Mattea earned widespread regard as a hitmaker whose commercial achievements never overshadowed her knack for blending folk, bluegrass, gospel, and confessional singer-songwriter elements into her sound. That same dedication to country pop extended to mining ballads, honky-tonk numbers, and Celtic material, a breadth already evident on her acclaimed 1989 release Willow in the Wind. As the nineties progressed and her song choices grew broader, her presence on the country charts strengthened, with successive singles and full-length projects regularly reaching the upper half of the Top 20; the decade’s strongest seller proved to be her 1993 effort Walking Away a Winner.

Born in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, in 1959, Mattea began classical vocal studies in junior high while also picking up guitar after folk music caught her ear. She joined the bluegrass outfit Pennsboro in 1976 during her college years and left school two years later to relocate to Nashville, where she took various jobs, sharpened her songwriting, and eventually secured a Mercury contract in 1983 on the basis of a demo tape. Neither her self-titled debut, issued in 1984, nor the 1985 follow-up From My Heart yielded any singles that climbed into the Top 20. Although her twenty-first-century albums rarely matched earlier sales figures, they continued to draw strong critical notice and performed better in the United Kingdom than domestically, among them 2012’s Calling Me Home; after a six-year absence she resurfaced with Pretty Bird in 2018.

Her third album, the folk-leaning Walk the Way the Wind Blows from 1986, marked a decisive commercial and critical breakthrough. A cover of Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime” became her initial Top Five single, while the title track, “Train of Memories,” and “You’re the Power” each reached the Top Ten. Stardom solidified with the 1987 release Untasted Honey, which contained two chart-topping country hits—“Goin’ Gone” and “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”—alongside the Top Five entries “Untold Stories” and “Life as We Knew It.” Willow in the Wind, arriving in 1989, carried an even deeper folk imprint and earned gold certification thanks to the number-one singles “Burnin’ Old Memories” and “Come from the Heart” plus the number-two track “She Came from Fort Worth.” The album’s Top Ten single “Where’ve You Been,” co-written with her husband Jon Vezner, brought Mattea a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal.

Intent on refreshing her sound through its foundational influences, Mattea traveled repeatedly to Scotland in the early nineties to examine the ties between country and traditional Scottish folk. Her own recordings grew increasingly roots-oriented and wide-ranging; the ambitious 1991 project Time Passes By included appearances by Emmylou Harris, the folk trio the Roches, and Scottish singer-songwriter Dougie MacLean. Its title song and “A Few Good Things Remain” both reached the Top Ten, although overall single performance fell short of prior norms. Following throat surgery, Mattea rebounded with the more restrained yet still varied Lonesome Standard Time in 1992, whose title track nearly cracked the Top Ten.

She shifted toward a more mainstream approach on 1993’s Walking Away a Winner, whose title track returned her to the Top Five, while also issuing the gospel-focused holiday collection Good News that same year, an album that captured a Grammy for Best Southern/Country/Bluegrass Gospel Album. After several years away, she resurfaced in 1997 with Love Travels, an effort that balanced folk and mainstream country impulses yet produced no major singles despite solid sales. Mattea then moved to MCA for the ballad-centered The Innocent Years in 2000, a deeply personal tribute to her ailing father. Seeking to explore Celtic folk further, she joined Narada and debuted for the label with the eclectic Roses in 2002; Joy for Christmas Day followed in 2003 and Right Out of Nowhere in 2005. In 2008 she released the bluegrass-focused Coal on the Captain Potato imprint, then continued mining-country explorations with Calling Me Home on Sugar Hill in 2012.

Over time Mattea noticed shifts in her voice that made certain notes harder to reach cleanly. She had long worked with vocal coach Phoebe Binkley, who had also served as a second mother figure, yet declining health prevented Binkley from continuing. Mattea turned instead to Judi Vinar, a Minnesota jazz singer who conducted lessons via Skype. Discovering that her strongest register had moved lower, Mattea undertook a rigorous three-year process of unlearning and retraining; the outcome was 2018’s Pretty Bird, which ranged from the jazz-tinged “October Song” to an a cappella reading of the title track originally written and recorded by one of her heroes, the late Hazel Dickens.