Kathy Mattea photo courtesy of Narada Records
April 18, 2007 — Kathy Mattea's next album, expected out in the fall, will be a collection of Appalachian mining songs produced by Marty Stuart, and she says she learned a lot during the project.
"The whole thing about Appalachians and singing is if you feel like you're singing, you're doing it wrong," she tells Nashville's WKRN. "You're telling the story. You're getting out of the way of the music. So I had to unlearn a lot of stuff."
Kathy says she's had the project in mind for a long time. "I'm from West Virginia, both my grandfathers were coal miners, my mom worked for the United Mineworkers for a while, and both my parents grew up in coal camps," she says. "I'd squirreled away these coal mining songs for years, and when The Sago disaster happened, I thought, "It's really time to do this.
"I grew up listening to this music, but I didn't grow up singing it, and trying to do it justice is something I didn't know if I could do," she continues. "That's why I needed Marty." Kathy says she told him, "I need your stamp of approval before I can put this out in the world."
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