The Chicks Almost Dropped ‘Dixie’ After the Bush Controversy in 2003

The Chicks have had a busy year in the spotlight following the release of their Gaslighter album — their first in 14 years. And in a new interview on Essentials Radio with Kelleigh Bannen on Apple Music, they answer some of the questions everyone wants to know … and some you didn’t know needed answering.

Speaking with fellow country singer-songwriter Kelleigh Bannen, the trio’s Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer talk about everything from their biggest hits to their biggest slap in the face. And notably, they went in-depth about the decision to change their name last summer.

Going from The Dixie Chicks to simply The Chicks, the change happened in the midst of anti-racism protests across the country — fallout from the death of George Floyd and many other black men at the hands of American police. But the women say they’d actually been thinking about the switch for much longer, going all the way back to their banishment after speaking out against President George W. Bush and the Iraq war in 2003.

“That needed to happen, and we knew that needed to happen for quite some time,” Maguire says of the name change. “We were feeling uneasy about it probably after the Bush stuff and not knowing how to do that, and just trying to kind of mature with that name is really hard because you just feel like it has so many connotations that make people think they know who you are based on your name, and it just kind of felt icky. So we would try to move to DCX. So if you look back, a lot of our tour, our merch has DCX or The Chicks and just that subtlety was not catching on. So definitely, with George Floyd’s murder and everything that started happening with Black Lives Matter, we were like, ‘Oh my God. We got to do this and do this as soon as possible.’ But it took some time to just dot the I’s, cross the T’s, make sure it was legally, what were we going to change it to? We had a really funny management Zoom call where we were throwing out ridiculous names and it just came back to, we had to go through that to come back to, ‘Okay, the most obvious thing is The Chicks.’ Now, we got to get lawyers involved and figure out how to make that our name.”

“And it’s not like we were walking around feeling burdened by this name, it was more like when something changes or whatever,” Maines adds. “It’s like once it happens, then you realize the weight that was lift … You didn’t even know you were carrying that weight until it was gone. And then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re The Chicks? What were we thinking? That’s a way cooler name. What are we so scared of? We’re The Chicks.'”

The Chicks went on to talk about much more during the talk, including how their signature hit, “Wide Open Spaces,” was almost left off their first album by management. Check it all out on Essentials Radio with Kelleigh Bannen on Apple Music.