Now that the Dixie Chicks have dropped the “dixie” from their name, I got to wondering. They named themselves after the Little Feat song, not the Confederacy, so if the word dixie is tainted, should we call the song “Chicken” going forward?
Maybe we should, since a restaurant sign inspired the lyrics. Lowell George wrote the song with Martin Kibbee (credited as Fred Martin), a college friend who played with George in his first band, the Factory. As Kibbee recalled it, he and George had been up all night working on the song, for which George only had the riff. “As I was leaving, there was a chicken place with a sign that said, “Dixie chicken.” He’d been playing the damn thing all night, you know, “duh,duh, duh,” which was going through my brain. By the time I got home, I had written this song. When I came back the next morning to the rehearsal hall, I went, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” And they all looked at me, like, “Puh-leeze, you’re kidding!” and resisted the notion for weeks, but eventually wound up in chicken suits.” It became the band’s signature tune, appearing on the album of the same name in 1973.
The band performed a weirdly truncated version for the “Midnight Special” TV show, eliminating the middle verse. That rendered unintelligible the story of the lyrics, which Martin said he based on a girl he once knew. It’s worth watching to see the young Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt singing backup.
