If you’re a Dixie Chicks fan, then you know the band started with four girls singing on McKinney Avenue. You know Martie went to SMU and Emily went to Greenhill. And, really, you probably know almost everything else in John Spong’s 8,500-word cover story in Texas Monthly. Spong waited till the 7,100-word mark of the story to tell readers that hardly anyone would talk to him. An email exchange with Emily made him think the girls would participate; they didn’t. Spong went to Nashville, but the record execs wouldn’t talk to him either. As a result, from what I can tell, there isn’t much new material in the story. It reads like a timeline — a well-written one, I hasten to add.
That’s my beef with the story. Over on a blog called The Feminist Kitchen, they’ve got a different problem with the story. They don’t like the coverlines “Who killed the Dixie Chicks? And did they really have to die?” Their thinking goes like this:
[A]s American culture continues to tolerate, forgive and even celebrate domestic and gun violence, particularly against women — and as all three members of the band are alive and, presumably, happy and well with their post-Dixie Chicks lives and careers — we have the state’s most respected magazine pondering what “killed” the Dixie Chicks and “why they had to die”?
To me, that’s just plain goofy. Everyone knows that Frisco STYLE is the state’s most respected magazine.
