In 2003, the Dixie Chicks were all but disowned by nearly the entire country radio format, right at the time they had a No 1 single, when it was reported that Natalie Maines had insulted President Bush during a concert in London. They’ve continued to tour in the intervening years despite staying out of the recording studio until reconvening with producer Jack Antonoff for new sessions last year. Their previous release, 2006’s “Taking the Long Way,” won them the album, record and song of the year honors at the Grammys. The band’s first album in 14 years, “Gaslighter,” comes out July 17. However, the fact that they’d abandoned the Twitter handle was immediately apparent, as it’d been quickly snapped up by someone with zero followers. The group has been in negotiations with the blues singer known as Lady A since.Īs of Thursday morning, the name “Dixie Chicks” still appeared as a remnant in a few spots in the group’s official media, and is still active as a web address. In that case, Lady Antebellum also ran into an instance of someone already using the new name, although the group apparently did not realize it at the time the change was announced.
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Lady Antebellum shortened its name to Lady A - also a name the group had long unofficially been known by to fans and the industry - earlier in June. Anyone who’d be upset about that is already off the bandwagon.” The move was immediately greeted with derision by many conservative voices on social media, some of whom called it “virtue signaling” - although, as the country music website Farcethemusic noted in a tweet, “I can’t imagine removing ‘Dixie’ from The Chicks’ name is truly the ‘last straw’ for anybody. The originally Texas-based group picked the name up as a derivation from the Little Feat classic-rock song “Dixie Chicken.” If a ‘Dixie’-loving Southerner today insists the word merely represents a deep appreciation of their homeland, they’re probably white.”
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Variety recently published a guest column by Jeremy Helligar titled “After Lady Antebellum, Is It Time for the Dixie Chicks to Rethink Their Name?” Helligar wrote that the term “Dixie,” deriving from the Mason-Dixon line that separated slave-owning and free states, is “a celebration of a Southern tradition that is indivisible from Black slaves and those grand plantations where they were forced to toil for free… For many Black people, it conjures a time and a place of bondage. The move became official Thursday morning on all their social media accounts and in a press release announcing their socially and politically charged new single, “March March,” although it initially appeared without any formal announcement being made.