One day Kathy Mattea was driving down a Nashville street listening to a demonstration tape of a song she had been pitched to record. She recalls that it was ”swing, which isn`t really me,” that its lyric was ”light” and that her initial response to it was cool.
Yet she had continued to put it into her tape player for a listen now and then. And this particular day she suddenly thought this seemingly unlikely song, ”Burnin` Old Memories,” might actually be ”the perfect tune for my voice.
”I realized,” recalls the dark-haired West Virginia native, ”that the hook line was in a low register instead of a high register. I thought, `I wonder what that would sound like? That could be interesting.”`
The song she initially doubted now is blazing up the country hit charts at a faster pace than even ”Eighteen Wheels And A Dozen Roses,” the smash that won her the Country Music Association`s 1988 Single of the Year honors and has helped make her a strong candidate for its 1989 Female Vocalist title. That crown jewel will be dispensed Oct. 9 in two-hour CBS-TV (8 p.m., Ch. 2) awards ceremonies from Nashville`s Grand Ole Opry House. Whether it goes to Rosanne Cash, Patty Loveless, Reba McEntire, Tanya Tucker or Mattea, the Italian-American nominee from West Virginia has finally and firmly established herself as one of Nashville`s preeminent own.
”I think it`s a horse race,” she says of the Female Vocalist competition. ”Probably what makes it really exciting is the feeling that anybody could win and deserve to win.
”My policy about awards is to try to be as accepting as I can of whatever happens, and to always be aware, whether I win or lose, that there are lots of great people out there who have never won awards. So it only means so much.”
If you`re thinking this is a woman who appears to have her feet on the ground, you`ve got her.
This is, in fact, a woman who, every Wednesday she`s in Nashville, breakfasts with a group of non-music business friends who discuss ”all kinds of stuff” instead of just somebody`s greatest hits. This is a woman who seems to worry as much about making art as making money. This is a country music star? Yes, and a big one.
She recently has had show-stopping performances at the eclectic New Music Seminar in New York and a taping of the prestigious ”Austin City Limits”
PBS-TV series in Texas. A couple of weeks ago, in her native state, she played to an estimated 300,000 persons in two consecutive nights.
In short, Nashville`s preeminent Italian-American has arrived. And the trip, as you might suspect, has been lengthy.
”In the beginning there were some frustrating years,” she recalls,
”when it just seemed like I was standing still. Other people were coming out of nowhere and being talked about, and I was kind of anonymous.
”But I was real lucky. My first record (`Street Talk,` 1983) did well enough that I could take off on the road, and from then on I was learning. I didn`t have another hit record for a few years (”Love At The Five And Dime,” 1986), but I learned stuff musically and about being a performer.
”Looking back on it, I`m really glad it has happened the way it has, because it feels more solid somehow. I`ve gotten to the point where I really want to do it the way I want to do it-and if that doesn`t work, I`ll just go find something else to do.”
The image she presents is much more that of the average young American woman than that of the average young country woman. She`s the daughter of neither a coalminer nor a farmer but a supervisor at the Monsanto Co. in Nitro, W. Va. And she was graduated not just from grade school but from West Virginia University.
She first arrived in Nashville as a folkish singer on sort of a lark, but quickly stiffened and stayed. She took a job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame both to support herself and steep herself in the heritage of this town she decided to conquer. She also worked as a waitress, ingratiated herself with the town`s young songwriters and became one of their favorite singers of demonstration tapes.
Eventually, in 1983, she was signed to Mercury Records and began her quest for prominence. She was forced to gather a lot of knowledge of how to put on a good show without hits by the time she got the biggest break of her career-a shot at opening for the great Texas singer George Strait.
”I think we did a couple of dates with him before `Love At The Five And Dime,` which means that I had no Top 10 hits at all,” she recalls, ”and it was pretty scary to walk out there. But almost every time, it turned out good for us.”
She is hardly ”western,” while Strait is very much so. But his fans couldn`t have been more perfect for her in some ways. Like him, she is perceived not only as an excellent vocalist but also as a genuinely nice person; and Strait`s audiences are likely to appreciate that quality.
Playing to Strait`s huge crowds showcased her increasingly imposing talents on a large scale. It probably is no accident that her first huge hit, ”18 Wheels,” and her first major award, CMA Single of the Year, followed two years of steady Strait work.
Her success with Strait, however, wasn`t something to be taken for granted. He is, after all, one of country music`s foremost sex symbols-a cowboy at whom, Mattea notes, women throw everything from their boots to their underwear. But Mattea disarmed their potential enmity.
”I don`t feel like what I do is a sexual thing,” she says. ”I don`t have big cleavage, and I don`t flaunt that. It`s just not part of my schtick. ”I don`t even think in terms of gender very much. I mean, I think of myself as a human being first, and I`m singing to other human beings.”
The ”terms” she thinks in tend to be musical, and very diversely so. With the expert aid of Allen Reynolds, her longtime producer, her hits have been perhaps the most varied on the female country scene.
”My theory is, if you don`t like the song we`re doing now, chances are you`ll like the next one,” she quips with a laugh.
In the beginning of her association with Reynolds, she remembers, Mercury executives kept asking them for an identifiable sound with which every listener could associate her. Reynolds gently balked.
”Allen would say, `You will always be happy if you give them a surprise. Then, when everybody`s sick of everybody else`s sound, they`ll still be waiting to see what you come up with next.`
”When I go to play live, I appreciate Allen so much. Now I`m feeling the cumulative effect of the songs I`ve chosen with his help. Going from `Goin`
Gone` into `Willow In The Wind` into `Come From The Heart` into `Untold Stories` and `Life As We Knew It` and `Where`ve You Been,` there never is a time a song comes up and I think, `Oh, that one.` They`re all songs I still love to sing.”
The last song mentioned-a striking one co-written from life by Mattea`s songwriter-husband, Jon Vezner-is the one she has been singing the shortest time, but it may become one of her best-known.
A bittersweet lyric about a love that lasted 60 years-from courtship to the threshold of death-”Where`ve You Been” stopped the shows at the New Music Seminar and ”Austin City Limits” and brought a flood of letters and calls after she performed it on the Music City News awards show earlier this year.
At the insistence of the record company, it will be the Mattea single that follows ”Burnin` Old Memories.” The fact that its climactic verse deals with a hospital and some of the more unpleasant realities of aging makes it a gamble-”Do people want to hear that on their radio driving to work Monday morning?” Mattea wonders-but the her willingness to take such a gamble discloses something about both her intelligence and her cool nerve.
”We`re cruising pretty good right now,” she reflects. ”Things are good with me, and people usually don`t want to rock the boat at this point.
”But I feel it`s important to always remember to take a risk if it makes sense. I also think this is a good song to do it with and a good time of year- the holiday season, with its consciousness of long-term relationships-to try it.
”Other than that, I`ve sort of let go of it,” she adds. ”Whatever happens, I can accept.”
