KATHY MATTEA
Calling Me Home
Sugar Hill
In a career
dating back to the 1980s, Kathy Mattea had a bunch of country hits. In 2008,
though, she shucked all commercial pretence and released Coal, a thematic folk
and bluegrass album of songs about the lives of Appalachian coal miners. It was
her finest work ever. Whether singing about lost ways of life or of lost lives,
she found the emotional essence of each song and brought it, sometimes
powerfully, sometimes beautifully, to the fore.
Although only a
few of the songs on Calling Me Home explicitly deal with coal miners, the album,
both thematically and musically, does continue in the vein of Coal and at least
equals, if not surpasses, the predecessor’s achievement.
The deep
Appalachian roots of the album are signaled from the beginning of the first song,
Michael and Janet Dowling’s “A Far Cry,” when the first sound heard is the fiddle
and the second is the mandolin. The song itself, memorably recorded years ago
by Del McCoury, is a powerful song of regret from the perspective of someone
who forsook their life in the Appalachians, and the love they had there.
As noted,
several songs deal directly with coal mining issues. Jean Ritchie’s quietly
powerful “West Virginia Mine Disaster,” sung from the perspective of a woman
whose husband was one of many men lost in the latest mining disaster and who
fears a similar fate could await her sons. “Black Waters,” also written by
Jean, and equally quietly powerful, is a lament for the environmental devastation
the coal industry has wreaked in states like Kentucky, where Jean comes from,
and West Virginia, where Kathy comes from. In Larry Cordle’s “Hello, My Name is
Coal,” the narrator is coal itself contrasting its virtues and its sins.
Most of the
other songs are drawn from writers who are either from the Appalachians like the late
Hazel Dickens, or who have immersed themselves in the traditional culture
and/or music. Among the most compelling are Si Kahn’s “Gone, Gonna Rise Again,”
in which a beloved and wise grandfather is recalled; and Alice Gerrard’s “Calling
Me Home,” sung a cappella with chilling harmonies by Tim Eriksen, in which a dying
man says his farewells.
The mostly-acoustic
arrangements featuring such musicians and harmony singers as Bryan Sutton, Stuart
Duncan, Tim O’Brien, Emmylou Harris, Aoife O’Donovan, Mollie O’Brien and Alison
Krauss serve the songs perfectly.
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