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Kathy Mattea, a country-bluegrass musician and environmental activist featured in Coal Country, comes from a West Virginia family with a rich coal-mining history. She has been a successful musician for decades, and if her latest album, Coal wins the Grammy it's already up for, it wouldn't be her first—but once she started learning about mountaintop removal mining while working with Al Gore just a few years ago, she decided she needed to start speaking out. I had a chance to talk with Kathy Mattea just a few days after the Coal Country premiere on Planet Green.
PG: Can you talk about your latest record, Coal, and how your activism on mountaintop removal plays into it?
Kathy Mattea: Coal was part of my background, but I didn't realize how much it was still part of my life when I was a kid, just because no one was coming in with coal dust all over them. I thought I was kind of removed from coal, but that's part of what I discovered through this record, was how much coal still influenced my life.
The CD that I made is really about the history of coal. While I was making the CD, I trained with Al Gore to do the Inconvenient Truth slideshow as part of The Climate Project. Doing research for that slideshow is where I really found out about mountaintop removal.
So through my shows, I try to present the lore of coal-mining and that chunk of history, Appalachian music history, and how it ties into the culture there. I really let the music do the talking. But over the last few years, the Inconvenient Truth slideshow has morphed for me into a slideshow about mountaintop removal. I think it's really important to differentiate that mountaintop removal is different than underground mining. They are different practices, they're different for the miners, and they have different impacts on the environment. Mountaintop removal is a small percentage of the coal that's being mined, it is hugely destructive, and a lot of people don't know it's happening.
There's this real sense in Appalachia that this is how it's always been—but instead of just standing on the stump and screaming, maybe there's something we can really do.
PG: Do you speak to people about this both on and off stage? Have you found any particularly effective methods of reaching out to people?
KM: In learning about mountaintop removal, there was this moment when I thought, this is very upsetting to me, I have a real strong opinion about it. But I began to feel like I was going to just be another celebrity with a cause, sort of screaming into a microphone. I thought, is that really gonna help in any way? So I started studying nonviolence and mediation, and trying to find a way to contribute something that might really help. I decided that the best place to start was with myself.
I'm interested in civil discourse. I'm interested in how we can begin to solve our common problems when we disagree strongly, and how we talk about that is as important as what we say. Instead of seeing everybody as the enemy, I've tried to stretch myself, to understand their point of view—whether I'm using that in a speech, or teaching adults how to have conversations about mining or all kinds of stuff. Or if I'm having a conversation with the governor of West Virginia, I try to think, what would it be like to be in his shoes. I try to work from there, I think that's the best contribution I can make.
PG: Do you feel that singing gives you a unique opportunity to be involved with the issue?
KM: I do. I think there are a lot of layers to that. There are people living in terrible conditions near these mountaintop removal sites. They're tapped into the hollers of the hills, and they've done some amazing work fighting back and educating their communities about what's going on. I think I can help get their stories out. I can sing a song that makes my point very clear, that's one advantage I think we have as musicians.
I've found songs about strip mining written in the 1970s that are word for word relevant today, and I've been able to find people working in the trenches today that have similar messages. The powerful thing about music is, in a three-minute song, you can sometimes reach people more than you can in a two-hour movie. There's just an amazing power to music.
PG: Has your family reacted at all to your music, and to your taking on this issue?
KM: Oh, they were thrilled. My parents were gone by the time I made this record, but my mom's last sister said, I wish your mom could have heard this. A lot of our family sat and told a lot of old stories because of these songs, so I've gotten to reclaim a lot of old family history. We all remember different bits of the stories, so we've spent a lot of time stirring them together into a bigger story again.
Related Posts:
This Land is Coal's Land: Mountaintop Removal Displaces, Destroys and Scars (Slideshow)
Find Out Your Connection to Mountaintop Removal
