The Chicks dropped “Dixie” two weeks ago, but they’d considered changing their name for years, the Dallas-bred trio said in a new interview with The New York Times.
“We were literally teenagers when we picked that stupid name,” fiddler and singer Martie Maguire said in the article. Maguire and her sister Emily Strayer started the group in Dallas in 1989 and named it after Little Feat’s funky 1973 song “Dixie Chicken.”
Lead singer Natalie Maines, who joined in ’95, said the name became particularly painful in the early 2000s after country radio DJs and listeners slammed the trio for criticizing President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
“We wanted to change it years and years and years ago … I just wanted to separate myself from people that wave that Dixie flag,” Maines said.
Strayer told the paper she saw the Confederate flag referred to as “The Dixie Swastika” last month on social media and immediately thought, “I don’t want to have anything to do with that.”
The band members didn’t discuss whether their decision was also affected by a June 17 Variety column in which author Jeremy Helligar, who is Black, argued the trio should dump “Dixie” because of the word’s association with slavery and racism. The group also didn’t mention the country group Lady Antebellum’s decision on June 11 to change its name to Lady A.
The Chicks’ new name is part of a massive cultural shift in the wake of protests over George Floyd’s death, including the banning of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events, the removal of Confederate monuments and the changing of the names of buildings, schools and food products deemed racist.
On July 17, the Chicks will release Gaslighter, their first album under their new name.
