Flying High

By the time the Dixie Chicks came to Nashville, they'd already been playing professionally for more than a decade. They'd released three indie albums of cowgirl pop, scored a jingle for McDonald's, and been named Best Country Band by the Dallas Observer four years in a row. They'd performed at the Grand Ole Opry and the Kerrville Folk Festival, opened shows for Garth Brooks and Doc Watson, appeared on the Dallas Cowboys' halftime show and Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion.

It was more success than most bands see in a lifetime. But the Chicks wanted Nashville success. So in 1996 they signed a development deal with Song, hired a new lead singer, and moved to Music City. Over the next two years of touring, woodshedding, and recording, the new Chicks - Natalie Maines on lead vocals and guitar; Emily Erwin Robison on banjo, Dobro, and guitar; and Emily's sister Martie Erwin Seidel, on fiddle and mandolin - worked overtime to tighten their sound, making it edgier but always keeping one foot firmly planted in the bluegrass tradition.

Leaving the studio in the fall of 1997, they were hoping they'd recorded an album gold enough for a handful of critics to take notice and a single poppy enough to make it country radio. They ended up with Wide Open Spaces, the fastest-selling country recording that Nashville had ever seen.

"They way it took off was just amazing," says Emily Robison, talking from her home just outside of San Antonio, Texas. "It's mind-boggling. You're so deep in the eye of the hurricane that you don't realize what's going on around you. We thought it was going to be one of those little left-of-center projects that musicians in Nashville get to hear. Our goal was to build our fan base. We never thought it was going to be a radio success."

In the two years since they recorded Wide Open Spaces, more than eight million copies have been sold, making it the best-selling group album in the history of country music. The Chicks have toured all around the world, scored a string of No. 1 singles, and taken home dozens of awards, including the 1999 Grammy for Best Country Album and the 1999 Academy of Country Music's Album of the Year.

At the beginning of 1999, they recorded a follow-up album that's better in absolutely every way. On Fly, the Chicks don't hold anything back: the playing is more confident, the singing more powerful, the sound more exciting. They're writing their own songs, playing their own solos, calling their own shots. And at a time when the rest of Nashville is moving toward a smoother, cleaner sound, the Chicks have maintained their edge, keeping their acoustic instruments at the front of the mix and staying true to their roots. Their independence has been well rewarded. In addition to being the only country album ever to debut in the top slot of the Billboard pop charts, Fly was nominated for five Grammies in 2000, including Album of the Year, and, at this writing, has spent more than 15 weeks at the top of the Billboard country album charts.

Martie Seidel started playing classical violin when she was five years old. Her sister Emily followed three years later, when she turned five. Growing up the second and third daughters in a musical family, neither of them liked to practice - but they did it anyway, steadying their rhythm with an egg timer while their friends were outside playing kickball. Twenty-two years later, Robison is grateful for it, but after all those years of lessons, she still considers herself a "horrible" violinist. "I've played around with it," she says, "but Martie always made it clear that violin was her instrument, even when we were really young."

Trying to expose the girls to a wide range of music, their parents took them to orchestral concerts and bluegrass festivals, where Martie started to make the switch from violin to fiddle, and Emily couldn't avoid noticing the banjo. "I was drawn to it," says Robison. "I was the kind of girl who always wanted to run with the boys. I wanted to do what they were doing and do it better. So banjo was one of those challenges, because I didn't see any girls playing it, and I thought it was just so different and bizarre and wonderful at the same time."

By the time Martie was 15 and Emily was 12, they were playing in a teen bluegrass quartet called Blue Night Express. Robison's earliest hereos were Earl Scruggs and J.D. Crowe, but the longer she played, the more she found herself listening to younger players like Bela Fleck and his teacher Tony Trischka. Blue Night Express started off playing gospel numbers and Flatt and Scruggs breakdowns, but as they grew older, they drifted closer to newgrass. To Seidel and Robison, it felt like they were rebelling - even though their parents still insisted the girls wear matching outfits on stage: gingham prairie dresses with puffy sleeves.

The five years they spent with Blue Night Express taught Seidel and Robison how to play in a band, how to take a solo, how to work an audience. They became much, much better players - and with the encouragement of Trischka, they also became more competitive. At 18, Seidel won second place at the Old Time Fiddler's Convention; at 20, she won third place at the National Fiddle Championship.

By then the sisters had outgrown Blue Night Express and started playing fiddle tunes on the streets of Dallas' Deep Ellum district, back up 30-something songwriters Laura Lynch (acoustic bass) and Robin Macy (guitar). Naming themselves after the Little Feat song, the quartet hit the road as the Dixie Chicks, playing folk festivals and state fairs around the South. One night they opened for Emmylou Harris; another, they opened for Bill Monroe. And as they built up their repertoire, Robison started looking for new sounds, putting down the banjo long enough to teach herself acoustic guitar and Dobro.

"I really started out of necessity," she says. "It was an experimental time for me, wanting to play different kinds of songs, wanting to play different kinds of songs, wanting to branch out. So I started playing the guitar, just to get a different texture, but I still strung it like a banjo. Eventually, I realized how limited that was to be playing out of G tuning - the chords sound so much fuller, the way they're supposed to, when you're in standard tuning. So I learned the chords by myself. And then a Dobro came along. I thought I'd learned it well enough to play this one song. But I just loved it so much that the learning curve was really quick. I ended up taking lessons, because my Mel Bay Big Note Book could only get me so far."

Within that first year as a quartet, the Dixie Chicks won Best Band at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, recorded their first independent album, and drew legions of Texas fans with a combination of cowgirl kitsch and bluegrass breakdowns. The music was ragged but right, stretching from country corn like Patsy Montana's "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart" to Irish trad medleys to smooth R&B tunes like Sam Cooke's "You Send Me." Their three indie albums - Thank Heavens for Dale Evans, Little Ol' Cowgirl, and Shouldn't a Told You That - show the Chicks dropping from a quartet to a trio, tightening their sound, and in a change that many of their Texas fans still haven't forgiven them for, smoothing out the folkier elements of their sound for a more comtemporary pop approach.

There are conflicting stories about whether Lynch and Macy quit or were fired. Looking back, Robison calls the earlier versions of the Dixie Chicks "directionally rough. I mean, we did bluegrass, we did blues, we did swing, we did country. There were constant contradictions. We wanted national attention at the same time that we wanted to stay purely Texas. We wanted to be everything to everybody, and that's just impossible."

Whatever tensions came up - and any group that tours this much is bound to have them - it's clear that by 1996 the Chicks had mastered the art of self-promotion, building a dedicated fan base in Dallas, selling 90,000 copies of their indie albums, and making a living playing gigs across the South. They'd learned how to run the band as a business, complete with logo, mailing lists, newsletter, press releases, and account books. They were big enough and organized enough to tour Europe, sign a development deal with Sony Nashville, and perform at Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural bash. And after seven years as the Dixie Chicks, Seidel and Robison were looking for a new singer.

Like Seidel and Robison, Natalie Maines came from a musical family. Her father, Lloyd, who's now a full member of the band, has played pedal steel behind some of the biggest names in Texas music, including Asleep at the Wheel, Joe Ely, Jimmi Dale Gilmore, Robert Earl Keen, and Jerry Jeff Walker. As one-quarter of the Maines Brothers Band, he scored six chart hits between 1983 and 1986; as a producer, he's recorded career-best albums by songwriters Terry Allen, Richard Buckner, Wayne Hancock, and James McMurtry.

By 1996, Lloyd, who played steel on Little Ol' Cowgirl and Shouldn't a Told You That, knew that the Chicks were looking for a lead singer and gave them a copy of Maines' audition tape for the Berklee College of Music. The Chicks were floored and asked Maines to come into the studio with them to record "You Were Mine" - the one self-penned song they later recorded on Wide Open Spaces.

"We really liked her voice," says Robison. "We knew her family, that she came from great roots, that she knew what the business was all about. But that song was the first test as to whether we even sounded good together. And the demo was just awesome. We got along great in the studio. And it just felt right, so right we didn't want to second-guess it."

So they offered her the job, and Maines quickly dropped out of Berklee and moved back to Texas to contribute to the third incarnation of the Dixie Chicks. With Maines trying the piano before switching to acoustic rhythm guitar, it was a time for practicing their chops, making decisions about the group's new direction, and getting ready for another visit by Sony. "When Natalie came into the band, we felt like we had a sound, and if we could go to Nashville, we'd want our producers to capture that sound," says Robison. "We knew we wanted to keep it acoustic - that's just natural, because we all play acoustic instruments - but we knew we had to incorporate Natalie's edge with our bluegrassy traditionalism. And I think Texas is the main thing that we all have in common, just hearing so much Texas music. We're coming from a place where we learned to figure out parts from the ground up, working out our own signature licks, getting down to the nitty-gritty of it. And Natalie came from the same place, the elbow-grease approach to music."

The Chicks arrived in Nashville ready to fight. They were determined to keep the banjo up front, even though it's hardly ever heard anymore on country radio. The were determined to play their own instruments, even though virturally everything else in town is recorded by studio musicians. And they were determined to record at least one song with their road band. But because they'd worked together long enough and learned to make their decisions as a group - creating what Robison called "The Wall of Blond" to resist outside pressure - they were able to convince producers Paul Worley and Blake Chancey to let them have their way.

"They had good chops when they got here," says Chancey, who's also produced albums by John Anderson, David Ball, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Jim Lauderdale. "That's what got me revved up the first time I saw them. I knew what great players they were, and I knew that whatever we did together was going to be built around their playing."

"We didn't want to be Nashville fluff," says Robison. "We wanted the instruments to be prevalent in the mix. If you're going to take a solor, make it hot - don't give me something I've heard a million times before. It's a little bit of the Texas philosophy to 'make your own mark - do something different.' Even if some people don't like it, the people who do will know that it's different. And whether or not we're the best musicians for the job, it's us. It sounds like us."

Sony gave the Chicks the time they needed to evolve, working and touring for another year and a half before heading into the studio. When they did, the Chicks found less resistence than they were expecting - but more than enough to keep the banjo back in the mix, play fewer solos then they'd hoped, and record only one of their own songs.

"It gets a little imtimidating the first time you're in a studio with the Big Nashville Producers," says Robison. "You're just hoping they have the patience to sit through what you do. I think Wide Open Spaces is a great album. But it was a series of compromises on everybody's part - not bad compromises, but more like, 'I'll give you this if you give me that.' And Fly was more like, 'OK, this is what we're going to do.' I was just hoping to make the grade on the first album. This second time around, I felt they had more confidence in our playing. And I think we achieved more of the true essence of the Dixie Chicks, letting each one of us shine in different places."

That essence is everywhere on Fly - in the energy of their playing, the high drama of their harmonies, the excitement of finally being able to play at the top of their abilities, and the confidence of being able to call their own shots. It's there in songs like Seidel's rousing "Cowboy Take Me Away," written with Robison's wedding in mind, or Maines' heartbroken, postdivorce "Without You," or Robison and Maines' sassy "Sin Wagon," a bluegrass breakdown with the hottest playing to come out of Nashville in years. And it's there on the solos: Robison's thudding, careening Dobro on "Hole In My Head," Seidel's bluesy Texas fiddle on "Hello Mr. Heartache," Robison's overdriven banjo on "Sin Wagon."

"Emily is a perfectionist," says Chancey. "By the time she comes into the studio, she already knows what she's going to play, when she's going to play it, what tuning she's going to be using, and what sound she wants to get. She'll sit there for hours, and she won't let up until it's right. Martie, she's a first-take kind of person, a feel person. You can put Martie in a jam with anybody, and she'll play from the heart. And Natalie, she just has this God-given vocal talent that is unbelievable. Every time I hear her sing, she's better. She's great now, and I don't think we've heard her best yet."

After playing 250 dates in the last two years, the Dixie Chicks are almost ready for a break - but after a couple of weeks of rest, they'll be heading out on tour again, first to Europe and then to Australia. At this level of chart-riding pop stardom, filled with magazine covers, television appearances, and stadium concerts, the demands on the Dixie Chicks are just too great for them to relax. There's no time for songwriting on the road, so the next chance they'll have is when they come back home to work on the next album, probably later this year.

Until they do, they'll be performing for larger audiences all the time - usually, audiences filled with teenage girls, rock 'n' roll fans who'd never dream of buying a bluegrass album. But for them, the Chicks' music is different: it's energetic, infectious, absolutely up-to-the-minute. Chances are, they've never even seen a trio of women picking their own acoustic instruments. And in a world where nobody else is encouraging them to dream about the wide open spaces ahead, the Chicks are well aware of their impact.

"I did have role models, but most of them were male," says Robison. "I mean, I had female role models too, they just didn't do what I was doing. So we'd like to inspire kids, especially young girls, to pick up instruments. Even if it's not a career, just to have fun. To be in a band. To break up the boy's club."