{"id":9807,"date":"2020-06-17T18:51:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T15:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/is-it-time-for-the-dixie-chicks-to-rethink-their-name\/"},"modified":"2020-06-17T18:51:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T15:51:00","slug":"is-it-time-for-the-dixie-chicks-to-rethink-their-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/is-it-time-for-the-dixie-chicks-to-rethink-their-name\/","title":{"rendered":"#Is it time for the Dixie Chicks to rethink their name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Is it time for the Dixie Chicks to rethink their name?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n The Dixie Chicks have a reputation for being one of the most progressive acts in country music. If \u201cGoodbye Earl,\u201d the Texas-bred trio\u2019s 2000 hit about a battered wife who offs her husband by slipping poison into his black-eyed peas, didn\u2019t tip us off, frontwoman Natalie Maines sealed their liberalism \u2014 and their fate \u2014 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when she told a London audience, \u201cWe\u2019re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that one sentence, she shattered the group\u2019s good name and hobbled their career, which has never fully recovered, as well. But about that name\u2026 The grand irony of the hoopla that ensued was that as she stood on stage declaring herself a non-fan of George W. Bush, the Republican president, she and her bandmates, sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, were performing under a moniker that, in some ways, represents up-with-whiteness more flagrantly than Bush, whom Kanye West once accused of not caring about Black people, ever did.<\/p>\n

The trio took their name from a 1973 Little Feat album, \u201cDixie Chicken,\u201d that is free of any overt politicizing. Its subtext, however, is a different story.<\/p>\n

\u201cDixie,\u201d for the record, is the epitome of white America, a celebration of a Southern tradition that is indivisible from Black slaves and those grand plantations where they were forced to toil for free.\u00a0The origin of the word, though, is unclear. One theory links it to Jeremiah Dixon, who along with Charles Mason, drew the Mason-Dixon line as the border between four states that later became the unofficial separation between free states and slaves states. Other less likely theories trace it back to a slave owner from Manhattan as well as \u201cdix,\u201d a word written on Louisiana\u2019s 10-dollar bills pre-Civil War that\u2019s French for \u201cten.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of its origin, for many Blacks, it conjures a time and a place of bondage. If a \u201cDixie\u201d-loving Southerner today insist the word merely represents a deep app<\/a>reciation of their homeland, they\u2019re probably white. Although the word is also tied to the black gospel group the Dixie Hummingbirds, who formed in the 1920s, and the Dixie Cups, the \u201960s girl group of \u201cChapel of Love\u201d fame, those acts come from antique eras when it was still acceptable to call blacks \u201cNegroes\u201d or \u201ccolored.\u201d Times have changed dramatically, and it\u2019s hard to imagine many Black Southerners today tying their<\/em> appreciation of their homeland to \u201cDixie,\u201d even if, according to legend, it\u2019s the title of one of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s favorite songs (one, incidentally, in which the author longs to be in \u201cthe land of cotton\u201d because \u201cold times there are not forgotten\u201d).<\/p>\n

Regardless of its origin, for many Blacks, \u2018Dixie\u2019 conjures a time and a place of bondage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cDixie,\u201d however, didn\u2019t bring down the Dixie Chicks. Judging by the response to Maines\u2019 2003 comment, many of the trio\u2019s fans up to that point were the types of Southerners who still lived and would die for Dixie, or at least a Republican-centric vision of the good old U.S. of A. Country radio immedia<\/a>tely abandoned the Dixie Chicks who, after the release of their defiantly titled Grammy-winning 2006 single \u201cNot Ready to Make Nice\u201d and album \u201cTaking the Long Way,\u201d refrained from releasing new records for the next 14 years, although they continued to tour successfully.\u00a0Last year the group joined Taylor Swift on her \u201cLover\u201d song \u201cSoon You\u2019ll Get Better.\u201d This year, they finally resumed their career as recording artists with the release of the single \u201cGaslighter\u201d and the forthcoming coronavirus-delayed album of the same name, which now is due on July 17.<\/p>\n

The delay was a good move \u2014 a global pandemic is clearly not the best time to launch a major comeback \u2014 and clearly they have advisors who earn their pay. So why haven\u2019t they convinced the ladies to address the problematic nature of their name?<\/p>\n

Those fans who dropped out after Maines dissed Bush would surely be the loudest to cry foul again if anyone messed with the name \u201cDixie Chicks.\u201d They\u2019d likely declare it merely an expression of appreciation for the modern South, not the Confederate South. They\u2019d probably defend it for the same reason some defend Confederate statues and \u201cGone With the Wind.\u201d To them, they aren\u2019t so much symbols of a racist past as they are emblems of everything that makes the South special. Frankly, of course, they may not give a damn about Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers or Rosa Parks. Their iconic South of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis is what made the aforementioned Black icons necessary and contributed to making their lives hell.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s some white privilege right there. When white people say they want to hang on to their cultural artifacts, regardless of how they might make minorities feel, it\u2019s the most passive-aggressive expression of white supremacy. They are basically saying their history and heritage is worth more than the history and heritage of Black people. Who cares if the Confederacy and words like \u201cDixie\u201d conjure memories of a time when Blacks were in chains? Apparently white Southerners matter more.<\/p>\n

In this regard, country music has been problematic for decades. In the late 1950s, it made a singer named Stonewall Jackson a star. In the \u201890s, Confederate Railroad racked up a string of hits. The Bellamy Brothers sang \u201cYou Ain\u2019t Just Whistlin\u2019 Dixie,\u201d Alabama gave us \u201cDixieland Delight,\u201d and Hank Williams Jr., one of the genre\u2019s most vocal opponents of Barack Obama and gays, went to No. 1 in 1981 with \u201cDixie on My Mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even Johnny Cash, who, like the Dixie Chicks, was one of the most progressive country acts of his time, hit the country Top 40 in 1982 with \u201cThe General<\/a> Lee.\u201d He was singing about the car Bo and Luke Duke drove on \u201cThe Dukes of Hazzard,\u201d the one with a Confederate flag painted on its rooftop \u2014 a tribute to Southern pride and the top military leader of the Confederacy.<\/p>\n

And of course, there\u2019s also the trio formerly known as Lady Antebellum. On June 11, the group\u2019s members announced they were changing their name to Lady A, to distance themselves from the racist implications of the word \u201cantebellum,\u201d which is literally Latin for \u201cbefore the war\u201d but is generally used to describe Southern life before the Civil War. Unfortunately, they apparently didn\u2019t realize that Anita White, a Black female blues singer based in Seattle, has been using that name for 20 years. What irony? They drop a word representing everything that\u2019s been taken from Black people and end up taking something else from a Black person.<\/p>\n

\"Charles<\/img>
Charles Kelley, Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood of newly-renamed Lady A.<\/span>Getty Images <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The bandmates claim they got the name from the antebellum architectural style, which really is just a fancy way of saying \u201cplantation chic.\u201d It\u2019s hard to imagine they didn\u2019t realize \u201cantebellum\u201d refers to more than a cool type of spiral staircase. It suggests an era of cotton and slavery, when women wore hoop skirts and had names like Scarlett O\u2019Hara. The plantation queen of \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d was the epitome of an antebellum lady. That\u2019s not to say the members of Lady A are racist \u2014 even if they spent years ignoring complaints from people who pointed out the slavery connotation of their name. But in this post-George Floyd era, you can\u2019t dismiss those voices anymore.\u00a0On the plus side, though, Lady A received more press attention than they\u2019ve gotten for anything in the decade since their 2010 crossover smash \u201cNeed You Now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Dixie Chicks don\u2019t need to change their name to get that kind of publicity, but their silence has been deafening. This is a discussion we need to have, and they should be a part of it.\u00a0With the country in the middle of a racial inferno and the release of \u201cGaslighter\u201d a month off, the Dixie Chicks\u2019 name could end up fanning even more flames than the title of their comeback album.<\/p><\/div>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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If you want to read more Entertainment News<\/a> articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“#Is it time for the Dixie Chicks to rethink their name?” The Dixie Chicks have a reputation for being one of the most progressive acts in country music. If \u201cGoodbye Earl,\u201d the Texas-bred trio\u2019s 2000 hit about a battered wife who offs her husband by slipping poison into his black-eyed peas, didn\u2019t tip us off,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20665,20667,20666],"class_list":["post-9807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-is-it-time-for-the-dixie-chicks-to-rethink-their-name","tag-nee-lady-antebellum","tag-should-they-follow-in-the-footsteps-of-lady-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}