Grammy Award-winning Nashville star Kathy Mattea brings her holiday show to the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech at 5 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 5.
“I put out a Christmas record many years ago, in the early ’90s. It took me years to make it. I decided that I didn’t want to just go do all the standard Christmas songs, so I spent four or five years just gathering songs. When I put the album out, it won a Grammy — in the gospel category, which was kind of surprising. It had just happened to be the way the album evolved. It had become all about the Nativity. It turned into a gospel record when I wasn’t looking,” Mattea said.
The two-time Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year promised the Ferst audience will be treated to a performance of her favorite song from that 1993 album, Good News.
“Mary Did You Know? was the centerpiece of this record that won the Grammy for me. It’s just one of those songs that you pray to God you’ll get to do in your life,” Mattea said. “The melody is gorgeous, the words are amazing. It’s just one of those inspired pieces.”
While Mattea, who has had four songs hit No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, was working on the holiday album, a friend of hers suggested that centerpiece song, which only had been recorded once at that time.
“She started reciting lyrics. All the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I spent the next day or two trying to find a copy of it. It turned out to be written by someone I knew,” Mattea said.
Now with two holiday albums to her credit, Mattea tours nearly every December to share Good News and other Christmas tunes.
“What we all found — all of us in the band — was it was a time of really connecting with the audience in a whole different way because people have so many longstanding traditions around Christmas. It is a time of reflection, and music is so much a part of it,” she said.
Mattea’s childhood Christmas was a “wonderful ritual with tons of aunts, uncles and cousins. On Christmas Eve, there would be this big family party at my mom and dad’s house. As it got dark, the whole family would start to arrive. The house would get louder and louder. Everybody would bring their regular dishes.
“You looked forward to it all year. Then you woke up the next morning, and Santa had been to your house. It was the best 24-hour period,” she said.
After dropping out of college at age 19 and moving to Nashville, Mattea was supporting herself by waiting tables. She found someone to take her Christmas Eve shift and drove home to West Virginia to surprise her family.
“That was maybe the best Christmas moment of my whole life, just seeing the looks on everybody’s faces,” she said.
Mattea perhaps is best known for her 1988 hit 18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses. “What a gift, you know, to have a song like that that has touched so many people,” she said.
A personal favorite of hers, Where’ve You Been, co-written by husband Jon Vezner, won her a Grammy in 1990.
“I came up through the session scene,” Mattea said. “I starting singing demos for songwriters, and so my voice was on all these demo tapes that got sent around town. People started asking who I was. … I had gotten to know people through the publishing companies that I was working for who sort of championed me and helped me get appointments with the record companies.”
These days Mattea also is known for her social activism.
I’ve gotten involved in some of the environmental stuff that’s going on around strip mining in West Virginia. I’ve been asked to write some essays about that. I find that’s where my writing juices are going these days,” she said. “I love the freedom of prose. … I want to get it into as few words as possible, but I want it to sing in its own way.”
Mattea’s presentations with Al Gore following the release of An Inconvenient Truth have “developed into a slide show about music and social change and the environment and nonviolence.”
But she continues to express herself with her guitar and voice.
“I think that there is a way that music can communicate with people beyond what just words can do,” Mattea said.
To purchase tickets to Mattea’s holiday show at Georgia Tech, visit ferstcenter.gatech.edu.
Twitter