West Virginia native Kathy Mattea, who was once a country music star, is trying to get back into the limelight by waging war on coal mining.

And she’s enlisted the help of several other rock, pop and country stars, including one from nearby Pike County, Ky., in her war on coal.

Mattea, in an exclusive interview with The Logan Banner recently, said she wasn’t against mountaintop removal mining, after she’d taken an anti-surface mining stance months earlier.

She said in the interview that she had seen the situation from both sides — she flew over a reclamation project and cried over the loss of the mountain, but then spent some time at a coal mine and understood the plight of the miners.

Now, however, she has turned back to her anti-mountaintop removal stance and will perform at a Nashville fundraising concert featuring Dave Matthews and others, that is being sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council to fight mountaintop mining in Appalachia.

The May 19 concert at the Ryman Auditorium, called Music Saves Mountains, will also include performances by Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, Patty Loveless and Kathy Mattea.

A news release Friday announcing the concert and lineup said net proceeds will go to pass laws to end the practice.

Tickets cost $45, $75 and $95.

Hopefully, no one will show up for the show, but there will be plenty of the great-unwashed environmentalists (or, as Staff Writer J.D. Charles calls them, “environmentalcases”) there to cheer the anti-coal traitors on.

What’s really ironic is that the concert is being held in Nashville, far away from any mountaintop removal mining. Why not hold the concert here, Kathy? Because she knows they would be run out of the state for taking part in such an event.

Shame on you, Kathy Mattea and Patti Loveless, who comes from Elkhorn City, Ky., just across the river in Pike County, Ky. (Loveless is no stranger to being ashamed of where she’s from: She graduated from Elkhorn City High School in the tiny town, but claimed the more famous and politically-correct city of Pikeville as her hometown)

Both Mattea and Loveless are from coal-producing states and look at what moving a mountain — or a river, as they did in Pikeville to build roads and provided flat land for a cinema complex, the Hall of Justice (Pike County’s courthouse and jail) and other businesses and facilities — has done for their states.

We, here in southern West Virginia, wouldn’t have a wood products park on Holden Mountain, nor the Fountain Place Mall if it weren’t for post-mine reclamation. As anyone who lives here can see, we don’t have an abundance of flat lands, like there are in Mattea’s native Putnam County.

And that’s not even counting the jobs that mountaintop mining has provided for our people here in Coal Country.

Williamson, in Mingo County, is called the Heart of the Billion Dollar Coalfields, and a lot of that is due to surface mining.

We're sure that a lot of those coal miners probably have spent coal mining dollars and cents on Mattea's and Loveless's CDs and concert tickets.

But, instead of thanking the coal miner for those hard-earned dollars, they are biting the hand that has fed them for so many years.

Maybe it's time the coal miners and their families and friends spoke with their wallets by boycotting these musicians and singers, like Mattea, Loveless, Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller and others who take up the environmentalists' war on coal.

They site atop their ivory towers and tell the world how bad coal mining is when most of them don't know anything at all about surface mining and its benefits. All they see if one or two mountains gone and flat land in their place. Hey, if you want to see plenty more mountains, make a trip into West Virginia and visit with the people here in Coal Country, where coal is the lifeblood of our people and our economy.

We see plenty of singers and actors going to foreign countries for their various causes. But, we hardly ever see any come to West Virginia to see the struggles of coal miners and their families and communities in which they live.

All of these so-called-stars need to come to West Virginia and spend a day in a coal town like Logan or Williamson and see just how wrong they are to attack coal.

Coal is vital to our economy here in West Virginia. And surface mining is a big part of that.

I, for one, will never buy any CDs or songs by Mattea, Loveless nor any of the others who have taken an anti-coal stance and I hope more and more people do the same.

Kathy Mattea lied when she said in the recent interview that she isn’t against coal mining.

Now, her true colors are showing bright and clear and everyone whose lives are affected by coal mining needs to take a stand against her, the same way she’s taking a stand against coal mining and its many employees.

Boycott their music!

Speak with your wallets!

Take away their cashflow and see how quickly they change their minds and turn and embrace coal mining.