Kathy Mattea in the Southern Quote

She was born on June 21^st, 1959 in Southern Charleston, West Virginia. Kathy was a junior high student taking classical music lessons when she was introduced to what would become her true love, folk music. Kathy sang with a bluegrass band for a couple of her college years before dropping out and taking off for Nashville, eager to pursue her dream.

For the next five years she worked as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame while she cut demos and sang backup vocals for a number of Nashville songwriter and publishers. It was 1983 before Kathleen Alice “Kathy” Mattea signed her first record deal with then head of Mercury Records, Frank Jones. Her real break-through, however, came with her third album, whose single “Love at the Five and Dime” became her first major hit.

Kathy Mattea went on to find great commercial success as a country and pop artist. By May of 1988, she had become the first female to have a single spend multiple weeks at Billboard’s number one slot since Dolly Parton’s run in August of 1979.  Kathy is a repeat winner of the County Music Associations Female Vocalist of the Year with seventeen albums and 16 Top hits in her resume and she continues to explore her craft and her roots.

Ever breaking new ground, in the last few years, Kathy Mattea has surprised and delighted her fans by delving deeper into her Appalachian heritage, first with Coal, an album of old-timey Appalachian mining songs and then with her most recent release, Calling Me Home.

And in today’s Southern Quote we hear the satisfaction this popular artist has found in the music of her Appalachian roots. Grammy award winning singer/songwriter Kathy Mattea has said, “It’s a wonderful gift to be able to feel like you have a life’s work instead of a job.”