The (Dixie) Chicks: ‘We were used and abused by everybody who wanted to make money off us’
When the Dixie Chicks
signed to Sony in 1995, the label worried that their name was politically
incorrect. At the time, the bosses were more concerned about “Chicks” than
“Dixie”, a shorthand for the former Confederate states, although they warned
the Texan trio that listeners in the northern states might be put off. But
Natalie Maines and sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire stood their ground
and went on to become one of the biggest country acts of all time.
The Dixie Chicks
brought traditional instrumentation back to a genre that had been growing
overly slick. They used their country bona fides not in the service of
misogynistic murder ballads but, rather, cheeky proto-feminist classics. Almost
everything they did riled purists and pearl-clutchers, but that did not stop
their first album for Sony, 1998’s Wide Open Spaces, selling more copies that
year than every other country act combined.
Their slogan – “Chicks
rule” – became country’s “girl power” (their unfiltered sisterhood earned them
many Spice Girls comparisons), while the Dixie element made rightwing listeners
assume incorrectly that the women shared their politics. (In fact, it
referenced Little
Feat’s 1973 song Dixie Chicken.) The band’s conservative fans were in for a
shock.
In March 2003, eight days before George W Bush declared war on Iraq,
Maines, the lead singer, told a crowd in London that she was “ashamed” that Bush was also
from Texas. Denunciation and death threats followed. They were dubbed traitors
and “Saddam’s angels”. Local radio stations organised CD-burning protests and
US conglomerates banned them from the airwaves, hobbling their career
overnight. They would release one more album, in 2006, their last for 14 years….
