Review: A WINTER GATHERING WITH KATHY MATTEA at Kennedy Center

Kathy Mattea remembers the time when she was moping around the house, worried about making “an album nobody would hear.” It was 1993 and she was making a Christmas album minus the usual holiday standards or well-known carols. Santa was nowhere to be found; jingle bells, as subject or sound effect, was absent. 

The resulting “Good News,” her quiet and thoughtful acoustic album full of new songs about the first Christmas didn’t set sales record that first season. But after winning a Grammy for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album it grew to become a quiet classic. 

Enough of a classic that it’s the centerpiece of her warmly-received show Friday at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, titled “A Winter Gathering with Kathy Mattea: ‘Good News’ and Other Favorites.” 

Mattea has forged a singular path in her career, which grew out of the hills of West Virginia with an interest in folk and bluegrass before she discovered story songs that she took to country radio, becoming a voice for Americana before the genre had its name.

In recent years, she’s been both a narrator for Ken Burns’ “Country Music” series and host of “Mountain Stage.”

Lanky and chatty, she’s an appealing presence on stage with a voice that’s always been low, but continues to bring warmth with its resonance. 

Backed by an able band, she began her show with a handful of the kind of hits she brought to the top of the charts, starting with Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime,” her hit version of an old Don Williams record “Come from the Heart,” and the trucker love song “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses.” Amid them, she had a new song written by her husband Jon Vezner that she said she’s yet to record, “Green Side of the Grass.” 

From there, though, she exited and returned in a red velvet coat, her one fashion hint of the season, to begin a series of songs from “Good News,” and its eventual holiday sequel, the 2003 “Joy for Christmas Day,” along with just a couple of seasonal standards in original arrangements added in. 

Her holiday repertoire, like her secular songs, has always been well chosen. She brought the most out of original approaches such as Keith Whitley’s “There’s a New Kid in Town,” Buddy Greene’s “Mary, Did You Know” and Rob Mathes’ “When the Baby Grew Up.” 

This was especially true in the one song encore, her version of a song by Melissa Manchester, Beth Nielsen Chapman and Matt Rollings that addresses the grief that often underlies the season, “There’s Still My Joy,” which has only gained in stature since she recorded it in 2003. 

It made for a holiday concert gratifyingly free of the tinsel and glitz offered elsewhere, just as her own career has eschewed the rhinestones and flashy trends of Nashville. 

Running time: About 100 minutes, no intermission. 

"A Winter Gathering with Kathy Mattea" was part of the Renee Fleming VOICES series at the Kennedy Center Dec. 7. More information on the series online. 

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