Why the Chicks Dropped Their  “Dixie”

In late June, the Dixie Chicks dropped the word Dixie from its name. The bands statement was brief and elegant: We want to meet this moment. The Dixie Chicks were founded in Texas, in 1989. Back then, the band was a four-piece. (The sisters Martie and Emily Erwin, now Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, are the remaining original members; since 1995, the band has been fronted by the singer and guitarist Natalie Maines.) They wore prairie skirts and fringed blouses, and played a mixture of bluegrass and traditional countrycowgirls with chops. The bands name was a riff on Dixie Chicken, a 1973 album by the chooglin rock band Little Feat. Sifting through early press coverage of the group, I couldnt find a single critic who thought the name was repugnant.
Yet, among historians, there is little ambiguity about what the word Dixie communicates. Its use as a doting nickname for the Confederacy was popularized by I Wish I Was in Dixies Land, a minstrel song published in 1860 and usually performed in blackface. The song is credited to Daniel Decatur Emmett, a white man from Knox County, Ohio, though the scholars Howard and Judith Sacks have suggested that Emmett stole the tune from the Snowdens, a family of freed slaves who performed and farmed around Emmetts home town.
Dixie songswhich typically expressed nostalgia for the antebellum Southcontinued to appear throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. They were quite popular. Irving Berlin even wrote one, Karen L. Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, told me recently. She does not find the word to be merely descriptive: As a scholar of the South, I regard Dixie as a term that not only refers to the states of the former Confederacy but is synonymous with segregation. Cox cited the Dixiecrats, the group formed in 1948, by Strom Thurmond and other Southern Democrats who seceded from the Democratic Party because they disagreed with its support of civil rights. These resonances are part of what the Dixie Chicks selected when they selected the name, whether they intended to or not, Gregory Downs, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, said. Its important that theyand everyone who received that message of white Southern pridethink about what they took on.
Within modern country music, tropes that address a kind of vigilante Southern swaggeran insistence on both the rebelliousness and the deep moral purity of the Southern statesremain wildly popular, even rooted as they are in racial violence. Yet country music itself owes an incalculable debt to the Black string bands and playersthe Mississippi Sheiks, Gus Cannon, Frank Patterson, and Nathan Frazier, among otherswho predated the proliferation of the phonograph. (There are several compilations of the few Black string bands that did record; two exceptional ones are Altamont: Black Stringband Music from the Library of Congress and Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia.) Early labels deliberately sold country and hillbilly 78s to white customers, and blues and jazz 78s (or race records) to Black customers, thereby enforcing a racial fissure along genre lines.
For the descendants of people subjugated under slavery, neither intention nor ignorance now feels like a reasonable defense of these tropes. Yet white history is frequently marked by a kind of inherited blindness. In Southern Accents, published last year, Michael Washburn dissects how, in 1985, Tom Pettya Floridianused Confederate iconography to promote a concept album about the South. Washburn suggests that ideas of Southern heritage are frequently and purposefully divorced from the historical record. We inherit, restate, sometimes re-inscribe these notions, and then represent these ideas to the world, Washburn writes. If we push hard enough on just about any part of our life, we plunge through the surface into a history thats unknown to us even as it structures much of how we live.
Is it possible to love a place and to also disclaim its history? Does the place begin to disappear when its foundational myths are challenged? Washburn jokingly describes Faulkners oft-quoted line about the nature of timeThe past is never dead, its not even pastas the first Southern-history meme.
The Chicks have been at the center of controversy before. In 2003, nine days before the American invasion of Iraq, the band performed in London. As Maines introduced the single Travelin Soldier, she told the crowd that she was ashamed that the President of the United States was from Texas. When the backlash came, it was precipitate, catastrophic, and unrelenting. The Chicks had recently become the only female band in any genre to have released two consecutive diamond-certified albums, signifying sales of ten million copies or more. In our era of anemic chart numbers and fragmented attention, its difficult to reckon with sales of that magnitude. There was a lot to lose.
Fans piled CDs in trash cans and set them ablaze. Country radiowhich was then operated in large part by the media conglomerate Clear Channelblacklisted the Chicks music. These are callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around, Bill OReilly said on Fox News. Maines received one death threat so credible that the F.B.I. recommended that the band cancel a show in Dallas. (It didnt.)
What happened to the Chicks in 2003 can be understood now as a foretelling of so-called cancel culture, in which controversial or problematic behavior triggers mass disgust and renunciation. The Chicks endured the onslaught with relative poise. In 2005, the band started writing Taking the Long Way, its seventh studio album, with the producer Rick Rubin. Its an angry, reflective record. At the 2007 Grammys, the Chicks won five awards, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. Then the band went on hiatus.
Fourteen years later, the Chicks have a new album, Gaslighter. (Its release was delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and some physical copies of the record feature the bands former name, in bright-yellow letters.) Gaslighter is brasher and more pop-oriented than anything the band has done before. Part of this shift feels germane to our erathe idea of genre, as it applies to contemporary music, is growing less and less relevantbut it also feels like a final repudiation of country music, and of a community that mostly failed to support or to understand one of its biggest acts.
Gaslighting is a kind of emotional manipulation in which a bad actor vehemently insists on the veracity of some plainly untrue claim, thereby causing the victim to doubt reality and, eventually, her own connection to it. Its not a stretch to consider the longtime framing of the word Dixie (or any other paean to a South that was reliant on slaves) as a type of gaslighting. Americans have long been told that these representations of the South suggested one thingsome vague idea of regional heritagewhen, in fact, they have always meant something else entirely.
In 2019, Maines divorced the actor Adrian Pasdar, and Gaslighter, much like Taking the Long Way, is a spiritual exorcism of sorts. Maines is at her best when shes harnessing the righteousness accorded the freshly wronged, and she sings with the vigor and the specificity of a woman who has no one left to please. Perhaps this is what develops on the other side of a grievous public shamingfearlessness in the face of collapse.read more