The Acoustic Living Room
Songs and Stories with Kathy Mattea
Featuring Bill Cooley
Grammy Award winning singer Kathy Mattea and her longtime collaborator, guitarist Bill Cooley, have shared one of Nashville’s most musically rich partnerships for over two decades. In this special concert, the duo meets as old friends, welcoming you into The Acoustic Living Room to share songs and stories near and dear to their hearts — including Kathy’s beloved classics such as “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” “Where’ve You Been?,” and many other hits, plus a handful of more eclectic and often requested tunes from her extensive catalogue, and a sprinkling of brand new material, all reinterpreted for the duo format. Her 18 albums are woven through with bluegrass, gospel, and Celtic influences, and have garnered multiple CMA, ACM, and Grammy Awards. A genuine storyteller, Kathy draws inspiration from her Appalachian roots and is a torchbearer for often overlooked musical legacies like those of Hazel Dickens and Jean Ritchie. Her most recent album, Calling Me Home, is a collection of songs that celebrates the Appalachian culture of her native West Virginia and expands the vocabulary of acoustic roots music that has always served as her artistic center.
Opening the evening will be Bruce Dalzell, patriarch of the Athens music scene.
Dalzell is a craftsman, constructing delicate and thoughtfulfolk tunes that cut through all the pretense of the modern music industry to hit listeners at their core. Although his catalogue of tunes is not without dark or mournful underpinnings, his songs always glow out of that dark night, with the soft but steady warmth of Bruce. His personal musical achievements are enviable enough on their own, having been recently nominated for a WAMMIE award for his song “Tocoi Light,” and having graced the stage of West Virginia Public Radio’s much-celebrated “Mountain Stage” roots music radio program. His legacy is also manifest in his studio (I Love Brucie studios), his family, all musically celebrated themselves (his wife and sometimes musical partner, Gay is a member of The Local Girls, and their adult son Harlan is one half of The Princes of Hollywood), and his unflappable commitment to playing pro bono A&R man to the scores of hopeful, novice singer-songwriters who clamber to his long-running open mics at Baker University Center’s Bunch of Grapes room Wednesday nights, and The Front Room on Friday nights. Sensing that he could offer even more, he took it upon himself to create Singer-Songwriter showcases at Donkey Coffee for emerging local talent, which eventually bore a child in the form of an ongoing CD series. No matter how bad the new arrivals to the open stages are, no matter how many times he has heard the same cover song, he always gently taps his feet, and he always earnestly claps. For this, he has garnered neither fame nor fortune, but he does have the enduring respect of hundreds of strummers who left Athens better musicians than when they arrived.
