The main character of “Wild Is Her Favorite Color,” the opening track on Jenna Paulette’s 2024 country album Horseback, is a familiar figure. She likes to drink tequila. She has an open heart like a desert sky. And “Ready to Run,” sings Paulette, is her favorite song.
“It’s so interesting when young artists mention The Chicks, cover The Chicks, call back to The Chicks in a song,” says Marissa R. Moss, author of Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Busted Up the Old Boys Club. “Because everybody knows that to do so comes with the weight of what happened to them.”
In 2003, almost overnight, the country trio went from mega-platinum crossover act to pop culture blacklist after singer Natalie Maines criticized then-president George W. Bush. The Texas band was summarily — and brutally — ousted from Nashville and banned from country radio. They left the genre behind, collaborating with producers like Rick Rubin and Jack Antonoff for a comeback that expanded into the world of pop. But despite the Grammy wins, critical acclaim, and millions of streams, their place in country music institutions, including the Country Music Hall of Fame, remains uncertain. Still, even if the decision-makers in Nashville are unwilling to recognize The Chicks’ legacy, the proof of their impact is evident in the lyrics of the female country artists, like Paulette, who have come up behind them.
It’s a unique quirk of the country genre that it likes to call back to other country titles and artists.
“Country musicians are historians, each and every one of them,” explains Jason Mellard, Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University, in an interview with The Barbed Wire. “It’s a way of signaling an awareness of tradition. You’re gaining credibility.” He points to Barbara Mandrell’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” which references George Jones. “It authenticates the point she’s trying to make. But I do think it also comes from a genuine place.”
It’s easy to imagine Mandrell growing up to Jones’ songs on the radio — just like it’s easy to imagine a Texas artist like Paulette listening to “Ready to Run” with her hand waving out the truck window. And that’s kind of the point. When artists call back to Jones or George Strait, and now The Chicks, they often write from their memories, setting a song in a specific time and place. They’re saying, “I was there.”
On “Ladies in the 90s,” Lauren Alaina gets nostalgic for the brief moment in time when women dominated radio waves. Alaina recalls driving around to “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” “No Scrubs,” and, of course, “Cowboy Take Me Away.”
In the 90s, female country artists were so popular they could hardly be contained to their genre. Shania Twain, Faith Hill, LeeAnn Rimes, and Martina McBride all released country hits so massive they reached mainstream audiences. The Chicks rode the crossover wave as well, but they were twangier, more traditional, and their bona fides as instrumentalists were always front and center.
With platinum blonde hair and leather pants, The Chicks made traditional music cool. They intuitively blended an independent Texas spirit with Y2K girl power. Young women who might never have imagined themselves wielding a banjo had a new template for what it might mean to be country.
“There’s a generation of women for whom this music was so ingrained in their childhoods… like Maren Morris, Kelsey Ballerini, Kacey Musgraves, Mickey Guyton,” says Moss. “This was the touchstone. This was the biggest female country act around when they were young.”
That’s the kind of influence that bubbles up decades later, no matter how hard the industry tries to shut them out — or how many of their CDs get squished by tractors. After all, what country fan could miss the reference in “Ring Finger,” released in 2024 by ACM’s Entertainer of the Year, Lainey Wilson: “This here’s a song for all the girls / Who had the balls to walk away from Earl.” The callback to The Chicks’ 1999 single, in which childhood friends murder an abusive husband and then open a shop selling strawberry jam, is tailor made for young girls all over the south who grew up belting lyrics like, “And they don’t lose any sleep at night / ‘Cause Earl had to die.”
This is a relevance that the Country Music Hall of Fame theoretically institutionalizes. Artists become eligible for induction in the “Modern” category 20 years after reaching national prominence. Measuring from The Chicks’ 1998 major label debut, “Wide Open Spaces,” which went 5x platinum, their eligibility started in 2018.
Of course, the Country Music Hall of Fame remains something of a black box, with an esoteric nomination and selection process that just happens to consistently overlook the contributions of women and artists of color — out of 155 inductees, 16 are women and just four are Black or Indigenous. However, since the creation of the “Modern” category, artists have been inducted, on average, 31 years after becoming eligible, explains Jada Watson, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies representation in country music.
So, while Garth Brooks made it in a mere 23 years, an average timeline would place The Chicks’ induction closer to 2028 or 2029. That’s assuming the industry that canceled them is ever willing to acknowledge their influence — and that it’s an acknowledgment the “still mad as hell” Chicks would even accept.
“There’s no doubting of the legacy of The Chicks,” says Moss. “But their place in Nashville and the Nashville ecosystem is obviously very fraught… I don’t know if they’ll ever not appear with an asterisk at the end of their name in the minds of certain people in country music. I don’t think you’ll ever see Jason Aldean get out there and cover, ‘Goodbye Earl.’” In addition to the Bush-era controversy, The Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines has continued to unabashedly support reproductive rights, the plight of the West Memphis Three, and other social justice causes to which country artists like Aldean seem to stand in direct opposition. (Aldean and Morgan Wallen may have both profited from racism.)
Still, in the end, the more powerful canonization may be the one happening within country songs themselves.
“If you had asked me 10 years ago if The Chicks would be at the forefront of 18- and 19-year-old students’ minds today, I don’t know that I would have guessed that, but it’s true,” says Mellard. “Even without the backing of mainstream country, that audience is still there.”
He points to a gradual reclamation that’s happened over the last decade, as country stars like Musgraves or Morris have been vocal about the influence of The Chicks, a renewal he’s seen mirrored in his students.
“But it’s so curious because they love the heroic standing up for your values part, but they don’t necessarily recognize what the debate was that got them in that place,” he says, noting that his students struggle, for example, to differentiate between the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
A contemporary artist like Megan Maroney would have been five when Maines made her fateful anti-Bush comments. Which makes her young enough, perhaps, to understand The Chicks separately from their political legacy. Maroney won New Artist of the Year at the 2024 Country Music Awards after releasing her sophomore album, Am I OK?, on which she sings, “Someone take this cowboy away / Somewhere far, let him fly” — calling back to two songs from The Chicks’ Fly in as many lines without earning a culture war black mark on her name.
This year, even as The Chicks performed at the Democratic National Convention, a swath of MAGA TikTok set out to own the anthemic “Not Ready To Make Nice” — an almost reality-bending plot twist that suggests parts of the political right might be ready to reclaim The Chicks, too, as part of a broader realignment. Perhaps the edge of The Chicks’ message has softened with time. Or, maybe, their music is just undeniable.
There’s a frustrating hypocrisy to an industry that wants to embrace music twenty years after booting it off radio stations. But, such a move has the potential to foreground, finally, The Chicks’ legacy as artists. For so long, their cultural impact has overshadowed their craft, even as the influence of their sound is obvious in mainstream music.
“Their influence, you can feel it everywhere, whether or not their names are checked,” says Watson. “How do we properly contextualize their instrumental virtuosity, their lyrical sophistication, their harmonies that are unmatched?”
For decades, to cover or reference The Chicks was to make a quasi-political statement. But perhaps, now, enough time has passed that it’s no longer so polarizing for an artist to admit how deeply the trio influenced them — and there’s some justice in that.
“For all of these artists who do these callbacks, whether it’s right back to Hank Williams and the Carter Family or more recent, it’s a way for an artist to build their musical lineage in song form,” explains Watson, and it seems there are plenty of artists eager to trace their roots back to The Chicks.
It’s a craft trick that The Chicks themselves used in the wake of their cancellation, on the pointed “Lubbock or Leave It.” The song name-checks Buddy Holly, along with several of his song titles including “Rave On” and “Fool’s Paradise.” Like Maines, Holly was a Lubbock native who had a thorny relationship with his hometown. He came up through country music, then challenged the bounds of the genre, eventually departing for the greener pastures of rock and roll.
“I hear they hate me now / Just like they hated you,” sings Maines. “Maybe when I’m dead and gone / I’m gonna get a statue too,” contextualizing herself and her band within a tradition of Texas music that tenses between celebrating individualism and enforcing conformity.
As for Holly? He ended up as a legend anyway, in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.