When bombs were falling on Iraq in March 2003, Natalie Maines, lead singer of the world’s best-selling girl band, The Dixie Chicks, told a London audience ‘We’re embarrassed that the President is from Texas’. The backlash was intense and immediate. Academy Award-winning documentary-maker Barbara Kopple, collaborating with Cecilia Peck, followed these feisty women as they tackled the fall out.
Kopple and Peck tracked the lives of The Dixie Chicks for three years as radio stations boycotted their music, protestors binned their CDs and picketed their concerts and even sent death threats. Though the world didn’t hear much from these top-selling recording artists for the next three years, they kept making music, they had children and they supported each other. It was three years of damage control from the media onslaught, the threat to sales and the pressure on health and family life. As citizens who refused to be silenced, they came under increasingly political and personal attacks.
Shut Up and Sing is a powerful documentary about three strong women who did not back down and were still ‘not ready to make nice’ in 2006. By that time, they were no longer pigeon-holed as country and western singers and there were many more people in America who agreed with their anti-war sentiments. Natalie Maines, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire simply refused to ‘shut up and sing’, and their perseverance was gratifyingly rewarded when ‘Taking the Long Way’ became a resounding number one hit.
This film then is a testament to Kopple and Peck’s statement, ‘Nothing is more vital to us than having a voice, the respect we gained for these women who did not back down, whatever the cost, was life affirming. Their commitment as mothers, their determination to express themselves honestly through their music, the steadfast bond of friendship between them are as fundamental to the Dixie Chicks and to our film, as their opposition to the war.’
(PG) Directed by Barbara Koppee and Cecelia Peck
