Tour with Bogguss, Mattea coming to High Point

Oct. 12—HIGH POINT — Close friends Suzy Bogguss and Kathy Mattea, who have shared their lives with one another for decades, are sharing something else this year — the stage.

"We had always said we wanted to do this, and now we are," Bogguss said during a telephone interview from her home in Franklin, Tennessee. "And we're having a blast."

The long-awaited "Together At Last" tour, which comes to the High Point Theatre this weekend, features Bogguss and Mattea on stage for the entire show, swapping songs and stories in a fun, casual setting.

"I play some lead guitar for her, she plays some lead for me, and we sing harmonies on each other's hits," Bogguss said. "You also get to hear the background of some of the songs and how they were created. It's very impromptu, and I think that's one of the charms of the whole thing."

Showtime is 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and tickets are still available.

The show pairs two of country music's favorite vocalists. Bogguss had hits with such songs as "Drive South," "Letting Go" and "Hey Cinderella," while Mattea's hits include "Goin' Gone," "Come From the Heart" and "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses."

Bogguss and Mattea have been friends since the late 1980s, when Mattea was a rising country star and Bogguss was still trying to make a name for herself.

"Our husbands used to write together a lot," Bogguss said. "Kathy was a little ahead of me as far as her recording career — she was out doing stuff, and I was trying to get off the ground. Our husbands said, 'Y'all would really like each other — we've got to have dinner sometime.' So we did, and boy, it sure was the truth — we just really hit it off."

In the years since, they've had meals together, celebrated Christmas together and even vacationed together, but their schedules had never worked out for them to tour together.

"We just always had our own projects going at different times," Bogguss explained.

The two singers did manage to collaborate on a cover of "Teach Your Children," a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but that's about it.

During the pandemic, though, Bogguss began livestreaming a weekly show on Facebook, and she invited Mattea to be her first guest. They swapped stories and songs — and collaborated on songs, too — and they had so much fun they decided to take the act on the road. Thus was born the "Together At Last" tour.

"We've just found that we're very well-suited to singing with each other," Bogguss said. "It's just us and our guitars — it's a very stripped-down show — but there are still a lot of up-tempo songs in it. It's a rockin' little show."

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579