Former Dixie Chick Laura Lynch: No regrets missing out on band's success

Editor's note: This story first published in May 2003.

The mementos from her music career are tucked away in a room upstairs except for the cactus-shaped double bass guitar, which sits on display in the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.

Laura Lynch Tull spends her free time these days learning to oil paint. The walls of her spacious, airy home are dotted with paintings, both hers and pieces she has collected over the years.

There is no indication that Tull was the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks.

That was before the band's public battle with their record company, Sony. It was before the Grammy Award-winning album "Wide Open Spaces," and before an anti-war comment by Tull's replacement led radio stations to boycott Dixie Chicks' songs.

The Dixie Chicks started a U.S. tour Thursday night in Greenville, S.C., the first of nearly 60 stops. It was the first time the band has performed in this country since Natalie Maines told a London concert audience just before the war in Iraq that, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

Tull said she didn't want to talk about the controversy, but she recalled the time the group sang the national anthem at a Texas Rangers' game when President Bush was an owner of the baseball team.

"I love our president. I really do," Tull said. "I think the world of him. I really revere our President Bush, and I revere the highest office in our country to the utmost. And that's who I am."

The original members of the Dixie Chicks never dreamed of being at the center of a political storm. Tull, middle school math teacher Robin Macy, and sisters Emily and Martie Erwin were chatting one night in 1988 at a show in Fort Worth and realized they played all the right instruments to form a band.

They met a day or two later to jam in Macy's living room in Dallas, and the Dixie Chicks were hatched.

The band complied a list of the songs they all knew and began playing on a street corner in Dallas' touristy West End. Singing songs like Bob Wills' "San Antonio Rose," and Patsy Montana's "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart," the women played for ones and fives, and invitations to entertain at barbecues.

More: Dixie Chicks founding member Laura Lynch made El Paso debut at County Coliseum in 1993

The women dressed in cowgirl skirts and fringed shirts, traveled in a broken-down pink Winnebago and charged $400 for a 5-hour gig. They were more bluegrass than country, with a repertoire limited to old Western hits.

"We knew we would suffer if we played anything Top 40 country, so we played things from people 70 or 80 years old," said the 44-year-old Tull. "We wanted to be radio friendly, we just didn't know how yet."

The band had no name until the women were on their way to an audition. "We said 'What if we get this? We need a name,'" Tull recalled, laughing. They took inspiration from a song playing on the radio, Little Feat's "Dixie Chicken."

The band, a trio after Macy dropped out in 1992, worked hard and booked a steady schedule of parties, clubs and festivals.

"We were plugging along, doing our thing, and boom, people were hiring us for bigger venues. We needed a bigger sound _ so we hired Lloyd," Tull said.

Lloyd Maines was a legendary steel guitarist and record producer. By October 1995, Tull was out of the band, and Lloyd's daughter, Natalie _ 15 years younger than Tull _ had become the lead singer.

Tull wouldn't talk about the reasons for her departure, saying she and the group agreed not to discuss it. Tull said only that she was replaced and it always hurts to be replaced.

The group shed its cowgirl outfits for a more contemporary look and a crossover sound that appealed that mixed elements of pop, folk and country on albums such as "Wide Open Spaces," "Fly" and "Home."

Many of the group's current fans don't know about albums like "Thank Heavens for Dale Evans," "Little Ol' Cowgirl," and "Shouldn't A Told You That."

Tull quit music and moved to Mineral Wells to raise her daughter, Asia, who lived with Tull's parents while she was touring with the band.

Around the same time, she became reacquainted with an old family friend, Mac Tull, after seeing him at an open house. He had won a $26.8 million lottery prize in August of that year. They were married in 1997.

Tull said she has no regrets about missing out on the Dixie Chicks' fame and fortune but enjoyed being in the earlier cowgirl band, even though the hectic pace sapped her energy.

"It was worth it," she said. "I'd get anemic all over again to do it."

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Former Dixie Chick Laura Lynch: No regrets missing on band's success