Chicks' balancing act has fans in a fervor at Freedom Hall

By Jeffrey Lee Puckett, The Courier-Journal

The Dixie Chicks get away with murder.

Although they're a country act, they dress like a fashion layout in Rolling
Stone, boldly courting a young audience raised on MTV. To simply look at
them, to drink in the hot-pink spectacle that is the Dixie Chicks in
concert, it would be easy to dismiss the trio as a triumph of image and
marketing.

Through strong writing and sterling musicianship, however, they maintain an
undeniable link to the roots of country music. It is impossible to dismiss
them, because every passage they lift from the rock 'n' roll handbook is
balanced with a song of pure tavern heartache. They maintain this balance
far better than any other country-pop act in Nashville.

Last night at a sold-out Freedom Hall concert at the Kentucky State Fair,
the Chicks inspired the most intense reaction seen in Louisville since
*NSYNC. People were tossing gifts onstage, mothers and fathers were holding
up their children for a Dixie blessing, and there was an almost pathological
need to be noticed by any or all of the Chicks.

Even more remarkable was the honky-tonk jukebox legitimacy of such songs as
"Hello Mr. Heartache" and "Don't Waste Your Heart." You could clearly hear
that Natalie Maines, Martie Seidel and Emily Robison understand traditional
country music.

They also have a firm grasp on new country, which has pretty much choked the
life out of real country.

"There's Your Trouble" and "Ready to Run," for example, pretty much define
country-pop, but it doesn't seem like such a crime in the hands of the Dixie
Chicks.

They not only get away with murder, but make it seem fun.

Opening act Ricky Skaggs may have delivered the first truly rural music that
many Chicks fans had ever heard.

Skaggs and his band, Kentucky Thunder, hit the stage playing hard-driving
old-school bluegrass that cut through the artificiality of modern country
music like a mandolin string through a warm cow-pie.

Some of the younger Dixie Chicks fans were clearly bored.

But Skaggs earned a nice ovation for a set of hot, precise picking that
included several Bill Monroe classics, including a lovely "Walls of Time."

His only concession to non-bluegrass music was a solo rendition of Harry
Chapin's "Cats in the Cradle."

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