UPDATE: The Aug. 2 show has since been postponed to Sept. 20 due to illness.
The Chicks changed country music by sawing on fiddles and rocking out on stage, dominating the country-music charts in the 1990s and early 2000s before sparking political controversy for criticizing the Iraq War in 2003.
Twenty years later, a majority of Americans now believe that war was a mistake in hindsight, electing both Democrat and Republican presidents for publicly opposing it, firmly placing the band on the right side of history.
Today, the vindicated former Dixie Chicks navigate politics once more by dropping the word “Dixie” from their name as The Chicks rock Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, live on Wednesday night.
Launching in 1989 in Dallas, Texas, the band got its original name from the Little Feat tune “Dixie Chicken.” They began as a bluegrass group founded by the Erwin sisters as Martie (now Maguire) played fiddle, mandolin and guitar while Emily (now Strayer) played guitar, banjo and Dobro for three albums. In 1995, they added a new lead singer, Natalie Maines from Lubbock, Texas, whose raspy, edgy vocals would skyrocket the trio to superstardom.
Their breakthrough hit, “I Can Love You Better” (1997), catapulted the album “Wide Open Spaces” (1998) to go 13 times platinum and win the Grammy for Best Country Album. It also won a Grammy for “There’s Your Trouble,” one of the album’s three No. 1 hits, including “You Were Mine” and “Wide Open Spaces,” which won a Country Music Association Award for Single of the Year. It also had the crossover radio hit “Tonight the Heartache’s On Me.”
Their next album, “Fly” (1999), continued their dominance, going platinum 13 times and winning Grammys for Best Country Album and Best Country Group Performance for “Ready to Run.” It also topped the country charts with the coming-of-age anthem “Cowboy Take Me Away” and the wailing heartbreak of “Without You,” along with other smash singles like the feminist “Goodbye Earl” and the romantic “If I Fall You’re Going Down with Me.”
After that, their hotly anticipated next album, “Home” (2002), went six times platinum and won the Grammy for Best Country Album, featuring the Grammy-winning opening track “Long Time Gone,” the beautiful Fleetwood Mac cover “Landslide,” the Grammy-winning folk-country tune “Top of the World,” and the post-9/11 tearjerker “Travelin’ Soldier,” a hint at the band’s anti-war pacifism that would soon become the subject of controversy.
In 2003, the band was proverbially “canceled” by angsty Americans with Taliban fears who didn’t want to hear Maines’ comments at a London concert where she denounced the War in Iraq by President George W. Bush, who falsely linked Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda. Haters smashed their CDs with the type of “shut up and dribble” comments spewed toward athletes today, tragically sending the band into political exile as the anti-Toby Keith.
They roared back with their double-platinum album “Taking the Long Way” (2006), which transcended country music to win Grammys for Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year for “Not Ready to Make Nice.” The lyrics were defiant: “I’m not ready to make nice, I’m not ready to back down, I’m still mad as hell and I don’t have time to go ’round and ’round and ’round. It’s too late to make it right, I probably wouldn’t if I could.”
Most recently, the band dropped the comeback album, “Gaslighter” (2020), its title track destined to become a feminist cult classic. It was also their first album under the new name The Chicks, dropping the “Dixie” as Lady Antebellum changed to “Lady A” in June 2020. The change came a month after George Floyd’s murder sparked Black Lives Matter protests, standing in contrast to Jason Aldean filming a recent music video at a lynching site.
You see, The Chicks remain as they have for the past quarter century: on the vanguard of both music and popular opinion, and if the past is any indication, they’re likely to be proven right once again by the march of time.
