After winning two Grammy awards and two Top Female Vocalist trophies from the Country Music Association, Kathy Mattea has finally found her voice.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the celebrated songstress, whose "18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses" was named 1988's country music Single of the Year, has veered from the glitzy trappings of Nashville's commercial thrust to sing about ... coal.

Mattea's latest Grammy-nominated CD, "Coal," produced by Marty Stuart and released last year on her own Captain Potato label, is a brilliant 12-track collection of narratives celebrating the lives and struggles of those who make their living underground or in the austere environs of the coal camps. It includes such wide-ranging selections as Merle Travis' "Dark as a Dungeon," Hazel Dickens' "Black Lung," Billy Edd Wheeler's "Coal Tattoo," Utah Phillips' "Green Rolling Hills" and Darrell Scott's "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive."



"I wanted to make a record that hung together musically and had a nice flow," says Mattea, who will perform at the Mountain Aid festival Saturday at Shakori Hills.

"I wanted to try to cover different points of view about this life: some labor songs, some about the danger, some about the love-hate relationship people sometimes have with that life. There's a permeating theme of ordinary people who are thrown into a situation where they don't have great choices, and how they choose to deal with that."

Mattea's venture into the world of coal-mining was a coming home of sorts for the West Virginia native. Her grandfathers toiled in the state's mines and raised her parents in coal camps, and her mother worked for the United Mine Workers union.

The idea for the album came together in the aftermath of the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia, the explosion that killed 12 miners in 2006. Stunned by the drama and the pain felt by the miners' families, Mattea was overcome by emotion as if she were watching her own family's history unfold.

"I'd stay up late at night and [surf] the news services and find out what happened," she says. "Many times I'd find myself reading an Internet site and just sobbing for people I'd never met.

"[CNN's] 'Larry King Live' covered the funeral. I think they were looking for a graceful way to end the show, frankly, and I got a call and they asked me if I would be willing to sing a song. ... Somewhere in there, I thought, 'This is helping me process this grief.' I was so surprised at how connected I felt to the story of these miners. I thought, 'That's my grandparents.'"

While her decision to make the album was a return to her roots, Mattea discovered that singing authentic folk songs demanded a perspective and delivery different from the one she used for the commercial songs on which she had built her career. With Stuart as guide, she bypassed electric guitars and drums in favor of the acoustic instruments of the old-time and bluegrass music commonly played in the coal camps. She learned to sing with the kind of empathy demanded by such songs as the a cappella gem, "Black Lung," the hard-hitting classic written and recorded by Hazel Dickens, an award-winning artist who left West Virginia's coal fields to fashion an alternative life around Washington, D.C.

"I didn't know if I'd be able to wrap my voice around these very simple songs in a way that would be believable," Mattea says. "I didn't want to sound smarmy. I didn't want to sound loungy, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to pull it off.

"'Black Lung' is a great example. I had to not sing that song from any point of view other than just disappearing into the content of that lyric. So I had to strip away a layer of my own style that had built up over years in order to connect with the song in a more immediate way. I mean, Hazel doesn't perform that song, she inhabits it. That is a mighty gauntlet to have thrown down in front of you."

With her well-known persistence and devotion to quality, Mattea delivered her most personal album. It's grounded her in family and place and pointed the way to the next phase of her career.

"I feel I've stepped across the threshold into a world of music that is just so fun," she says. "So I feel that my next record will be in this genre -- mountain/folk/bluegrass/semi-Celtic. I love the stripped-down nature of it. It's very hard at this age, after doing it so long, to trust a simple song to do its own job. That's been such a lesson for me. You have to get your ego out of the way to do these songs, because the songs are the point.

"This has been like going back and picking up a missing link for me. I have to say, that part has been the most joyful part and surprisingly so. I thought it would be nice, but I had no idea how having that piece of the puzzle in place has helped me make sense of everything else. What I have learned from singing 'Black Lung' has changed the way I sing. It's just such fun to be 49 and be able to surprise yourself. It's such a gift!"

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