Dixie Chicks Strut Their Stuff

The Country Music Association is honoring country music's finest performers at this year's CMA awards, to be broadcast Wednesday night on CBS.

CBS The Early Show Co-Anchor Mark McEwen spoke to the Dixie Chicks, who are nominated for the Horizon Award, given to new artists. They're also up for Group of the Year. Their new album is Wide Open Spaces.

Martie Seidel and Emily Erwin are sisters. The third "chick," Natalie Maines, tells how they got together:

"Martie and Emily started with two other girls in Dallas, playing for tips on a street corner. I joined three years ago, and that's when things started going... I'm kidding!"

Actually, it's true that the two sisters played for tips on the street when they were teen-agers. The response was so good, they never had to get summer jobs. Natalie joined later:

"We met through my dad. He's a steel-guitar player in Texas, and he played on two of their previous albums, and we met that way. They used to come over for dinner, and we'd slip them tapes. They called one day, and I had an economics test, [and] I decided time to drop out of school. The rest is history."

Emily says the group got its name after hearing the Little Feat song Dixie Chickens. They adopted that as their name, but when Natalie complained she didn't want to be a chicken, they changed it to Dixie Chicks.

Matrie says: "Those first five or six years as Dixie Chicks happened so fast. It was a real growing time for this band. We went from street corners to dance halls, from jeans and boots to tailor-made cowgirl get-ups with rhinestones. After finding some fashion sense and evolving musically, we finally found Natalie. That was the best thing that ever happened to Emily and me."

Are they nervous about they CMA awards, or going along with the flow? They say they are pretty tired from being on the road and don't have enough energy to be too anxious.

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