Chicks’ Singer Was Quick Study

The first time the Grammy-winning Dixie Chicks collaborated on a recording of their hit, “You Were Mine,” was more than three years ago.

It was a demo. Charter members Martie Seidel and Emily Erwin were auditioning electrifying young Natalie Maines for the lead singing role in the group. Maines just didn’t know it yet.

“Martie called and said, `You know, we’ve never heard Natalie sing live, but we’d like to come to Lubbock and have her demo one of our songs,”’ recalls Natalie’s father, Lloyd Maines. Maines is a well-known Texas steel guitarist and producer who had worked onstage and in the studio with a former configuration of the Chicks.

“At that time, they hadn’t offered her the job at all. Martie and Emily came and demoed the song with her. I played all the instruments (while the three were singing), and (then) Martie put on fiddle and Emily put on some guitar. Natalie sang lead, they sang harmony, and we overdubbed drums. It was a real thrown-together thing.

“Natalie didn’t know at the time that they were kind of scoping her out. I suspected it, but even I didn’t know it for sure. They came down and did it and didn’t really say anything that trip (except) ‘Great job’ and everything. Then they went back (to their Dallas home base), and about a week later they called.”

Maines says Seidel and Erwin telephoned Natalie on a Tuesday and asked her if she could be in Dallas by Sunday. She replied, “Heck, yeah.” In the intervening five days, they asked her to learn a full tape of songs, and on the Tuesday after the Sunday that she arrived in Dallas, the new trio did its first show together.

Natalie’s father, who has produced records for a lot of noted Texas singer-songwriters, says the new group fell together in no time - partly, he recalls, because his daughter (who graduated from high school after her junior year) “really absorbs stuff.”

Tillis to debut on Broadway

After Pam Tillis went to the trouble of changing managers last year during the same traumatic time she was going through a divorce, she explained that she had done it because she “didn’t feel like my horizons were broad enough.

“I felt a little hemmed in, like I was doing the same things every year and I needed to branch out,” she said. “I realized there’s still a lot of different kinds of things I haven’t done.”

There’s one less now. From March 16 through April 4 she will make her Broadway debut in “Smokey Joe’s Cafe - The Songs of Lieber And Stoller” at the Virginia Theatre on West 52nd Street in New York.