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.

A Better Way

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….

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