Welcome to
Court Yard Hounds @ CRCR!
Strictly speaking, it’s only a few feet from stage left or stage
right to the center spotlight. But it took Martie Maguire and Emily
Robison a couple of decades to move those couple of yards. As the
mainstays of the Dixie Chicks since they formed the group in 1989, the
sisters have been familiar faces to many millions of fans, yet just a
little mysterious in that familiarity, content as they were to cede the
lead vocalist position and remain music’s most recognizable “sidewomen.”
Chicks fans couldn’t help but hear those ever-present harmonies and
wonder if Emily and Martie might ever come out from hiding in plain
sight.
That’s just what they’ve done in their newly hatched incarnation as
Court Yard Hounds, with a gorgeously assured debut album that has the
siblings sounding like they’ve been fearless frontwomen all their lives.
Is this band a side project? They can live with that label. Or something
permanent? Yes, that, too.
Robison and Maguire could no sooner take an indefinite vacation from
music than they could from being related. So as the mother band’s hiatus
grew into a longer vacation than anyone originally anticipated,
“dormant” began to equal “torment” for these two working musicians. The
Dixie Chicks were last seen triumphing at the Grammys in early 2007,
winning the exceedingly rare trifecta of album, record, and song of the
year for Taking the Long Way and its flagship single “Not Ready to Make
Nice.” Something else they weren’t ready to do was make records or tour
again, at least for a long while, as it turned out. All three Chicks
enjoyed family time away from the media glare—but after a while Maguire
and Robison felt refreshed and rarin’ to go, which still left them one
singer short of a quorum. The usually bold Maines’ reticence to put
herself through the grind again had the effect of pushing her slightly
shyer bandmates out of the nest.
Read the rest of the BIO
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