Mountain Stage with Host Kathy Mattea

Two-time Grammy Award-winning artist and West Virginia native Kathy Mattea is the host of Mountain Stage. Over the course of Mountain Stage’s 43-year run on public radio, the show has become a second home for Mattea, who’s appeared as a guest on the Charleston, WV-based program more times than any other female artist. In 2019, Mattea began guest-hosting episodes of Mountain Stage, filling in for longtime host Larry Groce. In 2021, Mattea took over as full-time host of Mountain Stage. She aims to bring humor, heart, and a whole lot of unforgettable performances to the airwaves, showcasing both rising young talent and legendary veterans while at the same time sharing a taste of the West Virginia she grew up with.

 

Born and raised in Kanawha County, Mattea lived in West Virginia until the late 1970s, when she moved to Nashville to pursue her dreams of a career in music. She signed her first record deal in 1983 and charted with a pair of early releases, but it was her acclaimed third album, Walk the Way the Wind Blows, that truly signaled her arrival as a star. The record produced four Top 10 singles at country radio and set the stage for Mattea’s 1987 smash, Untasted Honey, which marked the first of five of her albums to be certified gold. Untasted Honey contained back-to-back #1 country singles, as did 1989’s Willow in the Wind, which helped Mattea take home two consecutive CMA Female Vocalist of the Year awards along with a Grammy Award for Best Female Vocal Performance. Over the next three decades, Mattea would go on to record nearly a dozen more albums exploring country, folk, Celtic, and gospel music, notch her first platinum record, earn her second Grammy, top the Bluegrass Albums chart, and garner yet another Grammy nomination for her album Coal.

The seventh full-length from four-time Grammy Award winner Sarah Jarosz, Polaroid Lovers is an album-long meditation on those strangely ephemeral moments that indelibly shape our lives. “What I love about a Polaroid is that it’s capturing something so fleeting, but at the same time it makes that moment last forever,” says the Texas-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist. “It made sense as a title for a record where all the songs are snapshots of different love stories, and there’s a feeling of time being expansive despite that impermanence.” Thanks to the rarefied alchemy that infuses all of Jarosz’s output — her finely wrought lyricism, ravishing vocal work, virtuosic yet unfettered musicality — Polaroid Lovers performs the much-needed magic of leading us toward a heightened sense of presence, all while casting a lovely spell with her timelessly powerful songs.