During the 1992 CMA Awards, Kathy Mattea had a decision to make. The singer-songwriter and 1989 and 1990 CMA Female Vocalist of the Year had opted to wear four red AIDS awareness ribbons, which had become prominent at award shows such as the Tonys, the GRAMMYs, and the Oscars. In ‘92, the Country Music Association decided to hand out green ribbons to promote environmental protection. According to a Billboard article, reports of the CMA’s decision sparked controversy and the organization reacted by offering to distribute red ribbons to artists backstage.
But there was no plan to publicly address the disease on the broadcast. After a local columnist wrote that country fans may not know what the red ribbons symbolize, calling for Mattea to publicly speak out on AIDS – which had become the number one cause of death for all Americans ages 25 to 44 – Mattea realized simply wearing the ribbon was not enough.
“We went to the CMA and said, look, we’ve been called out and I don’t wanna grandstand and I don’t want to go against you guys, but can you help me?” Mattea says. “We basically got no response. So the night of the show I had to decide what I was going to do. I didn’t want to be sanctimonious… How do you stand up in a moment when you feel called to do something bigger? I just went backstage during the commercial before and searched my heart.”
When Mattea took the stage to present, she spoke the names of three of her friends who had died from AIDS. One of those names belonged to her dear friend Michael, who had died without ever telling Mattea he had the disease.
“The problem was he couldn’t tell me,” she says. “You didn’t know who you could talk to and who you couldn’t back then. It’s hard to fathom now, but that’s the way it was.
“Something in me just kind snapped and I thought, I’d like to do something to help. I had a long talk with my manager and I was like, these people in New York who are working on this, they don’t even know that I’m down here in Nashville and we’re dealing with it, too.”
Mattea got in touch with the Red Hot organization, which was founded by Leigh Blake and John Carlin in 1989 to raise awareness and financial support around the AIDS epidemic. Carlin, who got his start in the New York art world, where he curated shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and befriended artists such as Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, had already experienced immense loss among his friend group.
“Being in New York in the 1980s was at the start this kind of paradise liberation. There was all this creativity. If you think of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in New York, it’s when hip-hop, punk art, music, the East Village arts scene, graffiti, all these things were really being born culturally,” Carlin says.
“Then by the mid ‘80s, the specter of HIV and AIDS turned what felt like a paradise into an inferno. All of a sudden people that you would see at parties or at openings – you’d go, ‘Where’s Nicholas?’ and people get that kind of quiet look and say, ‘Oh, he’s sick. He’s in St. Vincent’s.’”
Carlin, who had since left his job as an art curator to work as an entertainment lawyer, began working on Red Hot’s first project, 1990’s Red Hot + Blue, a compilation album featuring pop and rock artists such as Sinead O’Connor, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, U2, David Byrne, and more covering the songs of Cole Porter. The album was a smash hit, raising money for AIDS organizations, including ACT UP, a grassroots protest movement which successfully pushed the government and pharmaceutical companies to release drugs that now allow people to live with HIV.
Despite its success, Carlin had no initial plans to release more Red Hot compilations. He left the law firm where he was employed after the partners gave him an ultimatum. (“My reward for [organizing the project] was basically the partners of the law firm said, ‘stop doing that or leave,’” Carlin says.) Then he received a phone call that would change everything.
“I got a call from George Michael’s manager saying George was a big Red Hot fan. He wants to contribute a song to your next album,” Carlin says. “At the time, we didn’t have a next album. But, in 1991, if George Michael says he wants to give you a track, we were like, ‘Well, we better get an album together.’”
In 1992, the organization released Red Hot + Dance, featuring Michael, Madonna, Sly & the Family Stone, Lisa Stansfield, and more. The album cover featured artwork by Keith Haring. No Alternative, featuring Nirvana, Soul Asylum, Pavement, Patti Smith, and more, followed – and even spawned an MTV special with live performances. AIDS awareness was becoming a key issue among the MTV generation, but the country music industry was still mostly silent.
“I don’t think the seriousness of the problem has hit home yet with the country audience,” Mark Chesnutt, who co-chaired the Country Music AIDS Awareness Campaign alongside Mary Chapin Carpenter, told Billboard in 1992. “Most of the people who speak about AIDS and participate in the awareness programs have been in the pop business, movie stars and rock stars.”
Starting the Conversation
If Nashville’s music industry was slower to respond to the AIDS epidemic, it certainly wasn’t because the community hadn’t been impacted.
“If people found out you were HIV positive, there were landlords who threw people out on the street,” Mattea says. “There were medical facilities that would not take them in. I had a friend who worked on my crew for a while who was legendary in Nashville for taking people in during the AIDS crisis. If you had nowhere to go, you went to his house and he had an army of volunteers. There were lots of stories like that. But there was also a lot of rejection and a lot of stigma.”
After Mattea’s statement at the 1992 CMA Awards, she was quietly approached by people who had been impacted by AIDS. At an event the morning after the award show, Mattea was approached by a man named Bubba who worked at a large radio station in the Deep South who had lost his high school best friend to AIDS. Later, a man who worked for The Nashville Network’s hit talk show Nashville Now told Mattea his son was diagnosed with HIV. Another, a Nashville radio DJ, told Mattea that he had AIDS, but didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone else in his workplace.
“There were all these people in our community who couldn’t talk to each other about it,” Mattea says. “That’s what I was wanting – some compassion and support and for people to be able to speak up about what they were struggling with and hear each other.”
In 1992, Nashville mayor Phil Bredesen and Jo Walker-Meador, former executive director of the CMA, co-chaired the city’s first AIDS Walk. Mattea and Chesnutt performed at the event. With Red Hot + Country, Mattea set out to help expand country music’s AIDS outreach beyond Music City, leaving nerve-wracked answering machine messages for anyone she thought might be interested in taking part in the project.
“Kathy was very brave. I think it’s almost like a heroic gesture for her to take a stand at that moment,” John Carlin says. “Let’s just say [there was] a lot of homophobia in the South and country music in general, and AIDS-phobia. It was not a topic people wanted to talk about. It was really difficult. I think she made it her business so that people couldn’t ignore it.”
Hunter Kelly, a country journalist who hosted Apple Music Country’s Proud Radio from 2020 to 2024, says, as a gay kid growing up in Alabama, artists who championed LGBTQ+ causes felt like a safe place. He remembers Mattea’s speech at the 1992 CMA Awards and attending Reba McEntire’s 1996 tour and seeing her bring a replica of the famous AIDS Memorial Quilt, an ongoing community project to honor the lives lost to HIV/ AIDS.
“I definitely knew on some level I was gay, but I was also in a Southern Baptist church, so I was drawn to those things,” Kelly says. “I was drawn to that mainstream representation that was more open to queer people.”
“Teach Your Children Well”
Carlin says the original idea for the Red Hot + Country album was to have country artists cover John Lennon songs. He even met with Yoko Ono, who granted the organization permission to use Lennon’s songs for the project. But when that idea didn’t come to fruition, the theme shifted to the Laurel Canyon folk-rock scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the songs of Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Bob Dylan. The album would be produced by Randy Scruggs, a GRAMMY-winning musician and songwriter whose own father, Earl Scruggs, had played a significant role in the cross-generational Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album Will the Circle Be Unbroken two decades earlier.
“Randy kind of wanted to recreate that spirit of bringing generations together and, obviously, because of his dad, he had access on a level that I never could get,” Carlin says.
Alongside renditions of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Teach Your Children Well” and Jackson Browne’s “Rock Me on the Water,” the album featured covers of country classics, such as the Carter Family’s “Keep On the Sunny Side” that had inspired California folkies of the ‘60s.
The album also features the first recording by the band Wilco, which was formed by Jeff Tweedy in 1994 after the breakup of his former band, Uncle Tupelo. The group teamed up with singer-songwriter Syd Straw to perform “The T.B. is Whipping Me,” an Ernest Tubb song inspired by his hero Jimmie Rodgers, who died of tuberculosis in 1933.
Carlin says he wanted to highlight that Rodgers, known as the father of country, had also died from a disease that weakened the immune system.
“What is the difference between tuberculosis and HIV? Really nothing other than homophobia,” Carlin says. “It’s a disease; it doesn’t choose people.”
Other standouts include Nanci Griffith and Jimmy Webb’s “If These Old Walls Could Speak,” Patty Loveless’ “When I Reach the Place I’m Going,” and Marty Stuart and Jerry & Tammy Sullivan’s cover of the traditional gospel tune, “Up Above My Head/ Blind Bartimus.”
Perhaps the most stirring song on the album is Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Willie Short,” which was written by Carpenter’s producer and guitarist John Jennings after seeing a Newsweek feature called “The Faces of AIDS.” There, he spotted the photo of a Houston dishwasher named Willie Short.
“I was looking at the pictures, and under the picture of Willie Short, there was a very affecting caption and it just got to me: ‘Don’t forget me. From time to time, mention my name’,” Jennings told The Washington Post in 1994.
Red Hot also produced a Red Hot + Country television special, which aired on CMT. The program featured Mattea, Griffith, Earl Scruggs, Carl Perkins, Waylon Jennings, Vassar Clements, and more performing at the Ryman as well as interviews with rural and Southern folks impacted by the AIDS epidemic.
“Three Chords and the Truth”
In many ways, the early ‘90s seemed to usher in a new era in country, where queer issues were concerned. Kelly points to Garth Brooks’ song “We Shall Be Free,” which includes the line “when we’re free to love anyone we choose.”
“You also had Bill Clinton, who was a Southerner, but also a Democrat, in office,” Kelly says. “Culturally, in ‘94, there was a lot going on that dovetailed – I really see the Red Hot + Country album as country music being a part of the mainstream at that time.”
None of that translated to radio play, however. Despite the Red Hot + Country’s wealth of talent, Carlin says the album was “dead on arrival,” a huge contrast to the compilation album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles which was released the year prior and was certified Platinum three times by the RIAA. Red Hot + Country peaked at No. 30 on the U.S. Billboard Top Country Albums chart.
“Sadly, it was pretty clear it was homophobia in country radio,” Carlin says. “At that time, if you didn’t get played on radio, you couldn’t get arrested.”
Though Red Hot + Country didn’t gain the listenership of previous Red Hot releases, Carlin and Mattea both remain extremely proud of the project.
“It’s a beautiful cross section of musicians and music. Many of these people I know and love, and I feel proud of my community for stepping in and stepping up and doing something to try to contribute in this situation that just felt so impossible back then,” Mattea says. “I’m more of a ‘fraidy cat than it might appear, and I’m happy with my younger self that I could listen to my heart and step in.”
In the years since Red Hot + Country, LGBTQ+ representation in country music has grown tremendously. Queer artists such as Chely Wright, Brandi Carlile, Brandy Clark, Orville Peck, T.J. Osborne, and the Kentucky Gentlemen have opened doors within the genre. But Kelly says when he launched Proud Radio in 2020, he faced many of the same roadblocks Red Hot + Country faced 25 years earlier.
“There were artists whose publicists would be like ‘We don’t want to make [being gay] the main focus or we don’t want to belabor it,” Kelly says. “With the anti-DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] thing [from the] Trump administration coming in, we might as well be in 1994, as far as the mainstream country space.”
Kelly champions LGBTQ+ country artists Adam Mac and Chris Housman’s recently released “The Outside” as an anthem for queer country artists who’ve never felt embraced by the industry.
“I keep going and keep hoping for progress, but it’s disheartening,” Kelly says. “But also I look to artists like Chris and Adam who keep making great music and purposefully [making music] in the mainstream.”
Earlier this year, singer-songwriter David Michael Hawkins, an openly gay and openly HIV-positive country artist, released his song “Sin,” which addresses the stigma around HIV.
“When I started to look back on the emotion surrounding primarily the stigma attached to the diagnosis, that’s where the emotional well ran really deep,” Hawkins says. “Stigma is rampant in a lot of LGBTQIA identities. For me, the HIV diagnosis was a big part of it, which was also surrounded by poverty, which was surrounded by substance abuse. They were all in this weird cycle of feeding each other. The healthier I got physically, mentally, and emotionally, the more I was able to put words to that deep well of emotion.”
Hawkins says he wants to expand the conversation around HIV/AIDS by helping more artists feel comfortable with sharing their personal connection to the disease.
“Sin is not the first country song written about HIV. There are probably hundreds or thousands, but up until very recently and maybe up until my song, there’s no one that’s been transparent about that being the root of why the song was written,” Hawkins says.
“I think if the industry is doing our job, which is to offer a safe space for artists to come up with inspiration from anyone or anything, then the artists should feel comfortable saying, ‘Yes, this is about HIV, or this is about drug use, or this is about domestic violence,’ and however closely it’s attached to them as an individual. I think we could probably do a little bit better about letting artists know that no matter the subject matter or the inspiration, if it’s a good song and if it helps people – if it’s three chords and the truth – then we’ve done our job as country musicians.”
