Emily Mattie Lou O'Kelley was born March 30, 1908, in the Grove Level Community of Banks County, Georgia.  Her parents were Augustus Franklin O'Kelley and Mary Bell Cox O'Kelley.  She was the seventh of eight children, namely William "Willie" Augustus, Lillie E., Gertrude Mary, Lucy Ruth, Thomas "Tom" Gibbs, Benjamin "Ben" Franklin, Emily Mattie Lou and John "Johnnie" Tyler O'Kelley. 
   Many of Mattie Lou's paintings are based upon her childhood growing up on the family farm.  Mattie Lou watched as most of her siblings moved away to raise families, but she stayed on to care for her aged mother.  Her father died in 1930 and her mother died in 1955.
   Mattie Lou tried several different jobs such as working in the Maysville School lunchroom and at the mop plant.  She didn't enjoy these jobs and longed for an easier way to earn a living.  She tried her hand at painting and began selling her paintings at the Maysville Autumn Leaf Festival in 1966 for as little as a dollar each.
   In 1975, Mattie Lou took a bus to the High Museum of Art and showed her pictures to Gudmund Vigtel, Director.  Vigtel agreed to display one of Mattie Lou's works in the museum and directed Mattie Lou to the gift shop manager to put some of her canvases in the museum store.
   It was the paintings of her rural life in Georgia that caught the attention of Robert Bishop, who would eventually become Director of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York.
   In 1976, Mattie Lou O'Kelley was selected as a recipient of the Georgia Governor's Award in the Arts.  Shortly after, national media attention began to soar over her.
   In 1977, she moved to New York to live and paint in a studio apartment near her friend, Robert Bishop.  It didn't take long for Mattie Lou to miss the southern life and warmer climates.  She moved briefly to Palm Beach, Florida, and then to Decatur, Georgia, where she would live out the rest of her life.  She avoided public attention and became somewhat of a recluse, similar to her lifestyle here in Maysville.  It was during this time that she turned out some of her best works.
   Eventually she received a commission from a major Southern corporation to turn out a series of paintings that are to be kept together.  Her last works were for the former C.E.O. of that corporation.
   In her declining years, Mattie Lou returned to the Maysville area for visits to the Autumn Leaf Festival where she would sit and watch the crowd and autograph her books and calendars.  She still loved to come home.