Nothing like starting an interview out on a down note.

Exchanging the customary greetings with Nashville artist Kathy Mattea she reveals that she's a little blue this morning.

The day before she had to put down her seriously ill 18-year-old cat.

"It was real peaceful," Mattea says, trying to look on the bright side, "and she wasn't in any pain when she went, so there was a lot that was good about it. I thought, 'We treat our animals more humanely than we treat people.' "

That last sentiment says a great deal about Mattea, and what drives her personal and professional lives.

The Grammy-winning singer, who participates in a pair of workshops at the folk festival today and appears on the mainstage tomorrow night, has used her stature in the country music community to help raise awareness and money for a number of causes, and was even awarded the Minnie Pearl Award for her efforts at the 2001 Country Weekly Music Awards.

She is acknowledged as one of the first country artists to embrace the AIDS cause, and even helped spearhead the 1994 fund-raising album Red Hot + Country, which also featured notables such as Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, and Brooks & Dunn.

Mattea's reason for getting involved in AIDS awareness came about after the death of three close friends, including one who hid the fact he was dying because of the stigma surrounding the disease.

"If you're dealing with something like that and you have to be further isolated by some fear about who you can and can't tell, it just seemed unfair to me ...," Mattea says

"I went to my manager and said, 'I want to know if there's anything I can do.' That was my approach to it, was I want to try and open up dialogue so that people feel safer.

"It just felt like a way to channel my sense of loss about my friends and do something positive about it."

Her involvement with cancer fund-raising is equally as personal. The disease is one that runs through her family, and, ironically two years after she began raising money for a cancer research centre, her father was receiving treatment from the exact same facility.

That experience and the emotions that Mattea dealt with helped colour her last album, the gorgeous and poignant The Innocent Years.

"There was the sense that there was this role reversal going on with my parents and me," she says.

"(I was) having to take on the role of the parent ... and you can feel everything inside of you not wanting to do this, and you don't have a choice.

"You're passing across this threshold into the next chapter of your life and there's not a thing you can do about it. You realize in the middle of it that it's a rite of passage that everybody has to go through and it's part of the human condition.

"(The album) was about getting a handle on that and putting it in perspective and all of the emotions that you go through in that process." (More on: Kathy Mattea).