Success Mining "Coal"

by John Duffy, Correspondent

Sunday News

April 12, 2009

It's been a year since Kathy Mattea released "Coal," a collection of mostly 20th-century songs about mining life that has done nothing less than redefine her career. As she tells it, an album that began as a labor of love grew into a transformative force in her life. "It's turned into a wild year," Mattea said in a recent telephone interview from her Nashville, Tenn., home. "[The album] has rippled out in so many ways. It has become a life-changing experience singing these songs and exploring where they lead me in my own life."

For an album with no radio singles, released on a tiny label, "Coal" has sold well and was nominated for a Grammy for best traditional folk album. More important for the singer, the recording has given her a direction on her path as an artist and activist. Written between the grooves of "Coal" was Mattea's plea for an end to mountaintop removal, the controversial mining practice that involves sheering off vast tracts of landscape with high explosives to reveal buried coal seams. The stuff that's left over gets pushed down the sides of the hill and can drastically alter habitat. The Environmental Protection Agency recently ordered the licensing of proposed mountaintop-removal operations to be halted pending further review.

Mattea, in addition to touring constantly in support of "Coal," has been actively involved in lobbying for an end to the practice.Mattea was one of the first 50 graduates of Al Gore's course to present the PowerPoint version of his award-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." She used her experience to author a presentation of her own, "My Coal Journey," which traces the arc of her latest album from her childhood in the green corduroy hills of West Virginia to the stages where she sings about them. She gives the presentation about once a month at colleges and community centers.Advocates and activists in the coal region say Mattea's voice has brought attention to a problem often overlooked by the rest of the country.

Southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, ground zero for mountaintop removal, is a flyover region, depopulated and depressed since the steel collapse of the 1970s and '80s, and isolated by both its geography and economy."It really is a marginalized population," Mattea said. "A lawyer I know said to me, 'This wouldn't happen in the Sierra Nevada or the Colorado Rockies because there are people with money out there who would never let it happen.' "But the mountains [in the coal fields] and the mineral rights were bought out a long time ago, and other industries just seem to get in the way."

Growth industries, other than prisons and landfills, have a hard time making it there, and mountaintop removal employs a fraction of the workers that sustain traditional underground mining operations. The music of "Coal" and Mattea's subsequent activism threatened to brand her as just another angry celebrity voice. But Mattea grew up in coal country and knew the mining life, even though her grandfather was the last in her family to ride the mantrip underground."I was concerned that I was going to end up becoming the West Virginia state mascot against mountaintop removal. I wanted to simply add to the discussion."

Immersion in the study of nonviolent and nonconfrontational social justice work has tempered Mattea's anger to the point where she feels she can be of more use. As much as she wants to see an end to mountaintop removal, she knows most of America's power is still produced by burning coal. "My task is not to say, 'You're bad,' because they are fulfilling a need," she said. The success of "Coal" and the experience of delivering the album to an enthusiastic audience has reinforced a long-standing ethic that has guided Mattea's career. "I think fundamentally this has been a good reminder that an artist is charged with staying awake in their form. "I would never make a record just to fulfill a contract. I will always put in a conscious effort to better what I've done before. With "Coal," I just wanted to shine a light in the dark."