Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Larry Groce: Please welcome back to the Mountain Stage our sweetheart, Kathy Mattea.

[applause]

[music]

Oh the green rolling hills of West Virginia

Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know

Tho' the times are sad and dreary

I cannot linger here

They'll keep me and never let me go

Melissa Harris-Perry: This year, Mountain Stage hit a milestone in public radio. The live music program, which has become an ambassador for West Virginia and its music, just celebrated its 40th anniversary on the air, and its host is no stranger to the Mountain Stage.

Kathy Mattea: My name is Kathy Mattea and I am the host of Mountain Stage.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kathy started her career performing on the show produced in her hometown. After multiple Grammy wins and stints in Nashville, she returned to become its host. While Kathy's put her fresh spin on Mountain Stage for almost two years now, the show's longevity and continued success are rooted in its founding mission.

Larry Groce: My name is Larry Groce. I'm Artistic Director and one of the founders of Mountain Stage. The show is a two-hour-long live performance show featuring usually five guests, and the music varies from old-time American folk music to African music to modern singer-songwriters, and a little jazz, some alt-rock. It's just a wide variety of music, and that's what it's been since its beginning. It's now in its 40th year.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: 40 years is a feat in and of itself. In that time, Mountain Stage has released 1,000 episodes reaching nearly 300 public radio stations around the country, but before becoming a blueprint for live music radio programs, Larry says success and the show's decades-long run haven't been lost on him.

[music]

Larry Groce: It's a shock, it's a surprise. There were three of us, an engineer, Francis Fisher, and Andy Ridenour, our producer, they call me. They were working with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and I was a singer-songwriter. They needed a front person and someone to artistic direct. None of us at that time thought the show would last more than five or 10 years because shows just don't do that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Speaking of which, Kathy, you are relatively new to the hosting role, having inherited the role from Larry, but that was still almost two years ago. I love that that short for Larry felt like, whoa, 5 or 10 years, but what does it mean for you to inherit a four-decade institution like Mountain Stage?

Kathy Mattea: It's a great honor. First of all, I've been on Mountain Stage since the early years so I've been a regular guest on the show and so it's like a family thing for me. Mountain Stage originates out of my hometown so it's always been this-- I tell people it always felt to me like rounding home base every few years when I would put out a record.

I know them all very well and it's a source of great pride for all of us that this ambassador for West Virginia culture and for what it's really like to appreciate the hospitality and the low-key vibe backstage.

That's been a real hallmark of Mountain Stage. Keeping it going as far as the music and providing a platform, to be part of that is not something I ever expected and it's scary. It's a great honor for me to get to help this thing, hopefully, move beyond all of us and keep going.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kathy, what feels scary about it?

Kathy Mattea: [laughs] Oh, my God. Well, if you try to host, Larry makes it look so easy, but you get out there and someone says, "Go. It's seven o'clock," and then you have to host a live radio show with all kinds of moving parts. You say someone's name wrong or you get some fact about them, after doing a lot of research, you get something wrong and you have to go back and correct it. You want everyone to feel welcome and comfortable and they're being honored, but it's live and in the moment so there's a lot of moving parts. It's immensely satisfying to be the facilitator of this thing. It's a new skill set for me and so it's been a challenge and invigorating. When I can pull it off, it's really fun.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, Kathy, I love everything about what you just said. The Takeaway is not always live. Oftentimes we're not. Radio is so much harder than I expected it to be. I said I have a little sign that I keep in my home studio that says, "Radio is hard." It is true that great hosts, folks like Larry, make it seem like it's easy. It's like ballerina skill, all this hard work that just looks effortless.

Larry, I want to go to you on this because part of, as I'm hearing Kathy say that it felt like rounding home base and on the one hand, all this work that's going into the live aspect, but also the feeling that it's laid back, the feeling that all those facts and figures are just on the top of the host mine. Can you talk to me about what it is that makes Mountain Stage unique? What makes a stage Mountain Stage?

Larry Groce: When we started Mountain Stage way back in '83 I had a hit song. Kathy has had many, but I only had one. It got me on all the shows that the radio and TV shows of those days, like the Midnight Special and American Bandstand, the Tonight Show, and everything. What I did was tried to create an atmosphere on Mountain Stage that was all the best things that I liked about those shows and not do the things that I didn't like. For example, Mountain Stage never tells anybody what to sing or what not to sing. We give them an amount of time and we trust that they're going to do what they think's best.

We tell people to relax. We were actually live the first 12 years, so there was more tension back then, but still, even then, our attitude was this is not the operating table. This is not the battlefield. If something goes wrong, nobody gets hurt and everybody will be fine, and you'll do great, and we're so glad you're here. We're glad you come to West Virginia, which is a place that not every artist gets to because we don't have the venues. We were grateful for all that. We give people egalitarian treatment, whether they're ultra-famous or not. They get the same hotel rooms, same catering, and I think that's a very West Virginia trait. If you live here, I've lived here 50 years, Kathy was born and raised here, it's a very warm friendly person-to-person state, and we want people to feel that way.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more from the Mountain Stage in just a moment. This is The Takeaway.

[music]

By and by go and see the children

By and by go and see the children

By and by go and see the children

Oh na na

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're continuing our conversation with Kathy Mattea and Larry Groce from West Virginia Public Broadcastings, Mountain Stage. Now entering its fifth decade, Mountain Stage has become a launchpad for countless bands entering the music industry, Counting Crows, Phish, and Lake Street Dive.

[music]

Would it be true to set that I ordered you

Or is it you that ordered me

Melissa Harris-Perry: Whether it's set list or pre-ordered or live on the air, Kathy says that the appeal to both the bands performing on Mountain Stage and listeners at home has always been the authenticity of live music.

Kathy Mattea: That's the whole point. We say it's live performance radio because we all can now stream the music, we can buy the records, but there's something that happens between an artist and an audience when that energy is being exchanged, and that is the essence of what Mountain Stage is there to capture. I was thinking about being at our home theater, the Culture Center in Charleston. Everyone listens to everyone else's performance because it's live. They don't want to miss that moment.

For many, many nights, the backstage is full of all the other artists waiting to hear a new person or side players who have known each other for years bumping into each other unexpectedly and listening to each other's sets. It's just a beautiful thing. It's about appreciation in the moment. That very subtle and powerful exchange that happens when a person is singing to people and they are singing back, clapping along, responding, that's why we all started doing music in the first place. That's the juice.

Larry Groce: That's how many times people have met each other on the show and gone on tour together and played on each other's albums. That's not uncommon.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that kind of artistic matchmaking. What did Mountain Stage do during the deepest most painful and isolating days of the pandemic.

Larry Groce: First of all, we were lucky because we have a very deep treasure chest of shows having been on the air so long. We aired a lot of shows from the past, anywhere from few years ago to 20 years ago. They hold up very well and there's some great artists. We were able to do that and then as soon as we could, we begin to produce some shows with no audience and then with a limited audience and that's, Kathy can take over because she was the host then.

Kathy Mattea: It was a very poignant experience when we could get the artist-- Nobody was on tour, so nobody's coming up and down the East Coast, which is how the artists they detour to Charleston and then they get on Mountain Stage and then they go on to their next gig. Nobody was out, so there was a lot of work done by Adam Harris and Larry, and some of the other people who produced the show to see if we could get some live shows going. When people came, there were people who just burst into tears at the chance to play live or see each other.

We did it with, you can hear several shows with 5 or 10 people in the audience, but they were playing to those people out in the world who are listening and have come to appreciate Mountain Stage and live music on the radio out on all those stations across the country and people listening around the world on the internet. There was the holding of those people, even as they were playing. It became really clear that it was like, oh, this is-- I think all of us who play music realized how important it is and what we had lost during the pandemic. This felt like a very powerful way to affirm that and have a warrior mentality for keeping it going. We are going to plow through this just like everybody else and affirm the importance of live music.

Larry Groce: We have a live audience of about 400 usually, Melissa or something like that. It goes up and down depending on a lot of things, but since the beginning, the listener over the radio or however they listen now has been a palpable presence for us. We think about that and I think we talk about that to the artists too. They're playing to the house there, but they also understand that there's a whole lot more people listening elsewhere and that audience is who we're really trying to reach.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You talked about that deep treasure trove that you were able to access. Go ahead and dig in the crates for me a little bit and tell me who are some of the most iconic or perhaps memorable artists or performers that Mountain Stage has hosted.

Larry Groce: Over the years we've had all kinds of people. Off the top of my head, there are people like Alison Krauss-- Classic people, Bill Monroe.

[music]

Larry Groce: Doc Watson in that kind world, Ralph Stanley, Pop Staples, we've had big stars like REM, Martina McBride with Randy Newman.

[music]

Larry Groce: There's just been a myriad of people that have been on starting probably in the late '80s and going till today. It's a pretty deep well and it's a pretty wide variety. The Ali Farka Touré from Africa. There's just a lot of people that have [crosstalk] Phish made their first appearance in media, I believe on Mountain Stage. It's a lot of kinds of things.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let me end with you then on this Kathy, given this history, what can we expect? What is in the future for Mountain Stage going into its fifth decade?

Kathy Mattea: It's been a wonderful thing for me to have the trust of Larry and everyone else at the show to hand me this torch. My goal is to, I keep telling people, I'm just trying not to screw this thing up. Our goal is to keep going and to keep the vision that Larry and Andy and Francis started to keep it going because live music and access to live music and the wonder of discovering new music or being moved by something in the moment is part of the stuff that makes life worth living. We're going to try to keep that going in the world for another 40 years and beyond, and I'm excited to be a part of that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kathy Mattea is host of West Virginia Public Broadcastings Mountain Stage, and of course, its founder and former host is Larry Groce. Thank you both for being with us.

Kathy Mattea: Thank you.

Larry Groce: Thank you.

[00:15:44] [END OF AUDIO]

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