By Maggie Hoppel
“The Dixie Chicks do not advocate premeditated murder, but love getting even.”
—The Chicks, on the CD booklet for their 1999 album “Fly”
Hello, Earl
Written by Dennis Linde and performed by the 90s country band The Chicks, “Goodbye Earl” was the ultimate underdog of feminist music. To this day, its impact on its genre and feminism as a whole is largely understated. “Goodbye Earl” is a surprisingly effective call for social justice as it combines the virtue of sisterhood with a deceptively surface-level comedic narrative to combat domestic violence across the United States of America.
History of Earl
Despite “Goodbye Earl”’s chipper background singers and lighthearted feminine style, its lyrics create a striking portrait of domestic abuse in small-town America and offer listeners a morbidly humorous resolution. The song opens by establishing the friendship between two young women, Wanda and Mary Anne, with the lyric “Both members of the 4H club, both active in the FFA” (The Chicks) grounding the story in rural location and all-American aesthetic. When the women graduate high school, Mary Anne leaves town while Wanda stays to marry Earl, leading to a physically abusive relationship that The Chicks liken to the suffocating nature of small-town life. The song’s description of Earl’s domestic violence is startlingly blunt. Wanda conceals her bruises with “dark eyed glasses,” “long sleeve blouses,” and heavy makeup (The Chicks). The word “abused” is used explicitly. When Wanda files for divorce, the song delivers its darkest lines: “But Earl walked right through that restraining order / and put her in intensive care” (The Chicks). Arguably sacrificing poeticism and tone consistency, The Chicks dedicate this portion of the song to a direct, unflinching depiction of domestic violence in rural America.
However, “Goodbye Earl” shifts into a humorous tone when Mary Anne returns to help Wanda, and the two women devise a plan to kill Earl. The song’s chorus pairs the line “Earl had to die” with bright background music and flippant accompanying lines like “Ain’t it dark wrapped up in that tarp, Earl?” (The Chicks). In a humorous parallel to the black eyes he gave Wanda during their marriage, the song reveals that Mary Anne and Wanda kill Earl by serving him poisoned black-eyed peas. While the lyrics address domestic violence with intense gravity, the narrative surrounding Earl’s murder is satirical and mocking. In the song’s music video, the actor playing Earl returns in a decaying corpse latex mask to dance with The Chicks for the chorus (Front Row Music). The song continuously downplays Earl’s to emphasize its sympathy for the domestic violence experienced by his killer. The music itself is the only constant, the kind of upbeat, stereotypical ‘90s-country tune one could imagine playing at a tailgate. The song ends with a “happily ever after” where Mary Ann and Wanda evade local law enforcement and live on a small farm together.
“Goodbye Earl,” from the 1999 album Fly, featured lead vocalist Natalie Maines alongside multi-instrumentalist sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire. While Strayer and Maguire solidified the album’s country and bluegrass influences, Maines’s vocals contributed a rebellious pop-rock energy to appeal to younger audiences. This combination proved successful with the release of “Goodbye Earl.” By March of 2000, the song was No. 8 on the pop sales chart and No. 2 on the country sales chart (Lewis.) However, 144 of the top 153 country stations refused to play the song, claiming that its violent lyrics were inappropriate for public broadcast. One station argued that the song advocated for a double standard for violence against women and men, but later decided to play it alongside an advertisement for domestic violence hotlines (Kava). Organizations such as the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence praised “Goodbye Earl” as a method of raising awareness for such issues. Radio stations were swarmed with calls from domestic violence survivors who resonated with the song (Campbell). In their 2003 Top of the World Tour, camera footage showed thousands of enthusiastic women joining together to shout the lyric “Earl had to die.” Today, it remains a source of gleeful catharsis for concert audiences (Conderacci).
Dennis Linde, the lyricist behind “Goodbye Earl” as well as hits like Elvis’s “Burning Love,” explained that his intent was to create a “black comedy” with “no message” rather than a commentary on domestic violence (Lewis). He cited Arsenic and Old Lace as an inspiration for the song’s dark humor. Linde had also featured Earl as a character in the 1993 Sammy Kershaw song “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer,” where Earl attempts to steal the narrator’s lover. “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer” includes lines that arguably promote relational abuse, including “Sometimes she runs and I’ve gotta trail her / Dang her black heart and her pretty red neck” (Kershaw). Linde initially wrote “Goodbye Earl” for the band Sons of the Desert in an unreleased album, suggesting that the medium of an all-female band was a later addition.
“Feminist Country” Isn’t an Oxymoron
Country music as a genre has proved to be largely apolitical. One study found that only 73 of the 1,217 Billboard No.1 country songs from 1960–2000 contained “significant observations of a political or ideological nature” (Van Sickel). Perhaps the most well-known example of country music’s social impact is the Farm Aid charity rock organization, holding yearly concerts since 1985 to raise money and awareness for American family farms (Palen). Despite this, feminism gained a permanent place in country music through the work of pioneering artists like Kitty Wells, and the popularity of Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and many others solidified it as a subgenre. Intentional or not, The Chicks found themselves in the company of these influential women as audiences began to celebrate “Goodbye Earl” as an anthem of feminine liberation.
Early feminist country music, such as Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” postered itself as a response to male-dominated narratives within the country genre. Wells’s song, released in 1952 alluded to the “honky tonk angels” from the Hank Thompson hit “The Wild Side of Life” from the same year. In “The Wild Side of Life,” the singer mourns the loss of a woman who left him for her partying lifestyle, saying, “I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels” (Thompson). Wells, a wife and mother who performed in conservative gingham, released “It Wasn’t God …” as a stern reprimand. In it, she sings, “From the start most every heart that’s ever broken / was because there always was a man to blame” (Wells). The song was one of many that solidified Wells as an early superstar. While she didn’t consider herself a feminist, Wells’s perspective introduced the representation of feminine voices in the genre and on the radio. Emmylou Harris, a key figure in the 1970s country-rock movement, explains, “”All of the sudden, she spoke to a whole psyche. A whole generation of women who probably didn’t know that they were not represented on the airways” (Bufwack). However, this song, like “Goodbye Earl,” was originally written by a male songwriter. Louisiana producer J. D. Miller wrote “It Wasn’t God …” to subvert genre expectations through the novelty of a female narrator. Al Montgomery, a relatively unknown artist who at the time worked as a gas station attendant, was the first to record it (Hit Histories). Only when combined with Kitty Wells’s no-nonsense vocals and motherly style did the song gain popularity and cultivate the legacy it’s known for today. In an interview, Wells said that she decided to record the song because it matched her perspective on “The Wild Side of Life” and the male-dominated narratives topping the charts in country music. What happened next, Wells said, was this: “Capitol Records got to recording the girl singers, so now we got just about as many girl singers as there are men singers” (Bufwack).
In the 1960s and 70s, Dolly Parton became a hyper-feminine force on the scene of country music. Parton was heavily influenced by Wells, releasing a 1993 album alongside contemporaries Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette using the band name “Honky Tonk Angels” (Haynes). Building on Wells’s legacy, Parton celebrated femininity through an extravagant personal image and detailed storytelling. On the song “9 to 5,” she simultaneously credited her acrylic nails as a musical instrument—“nails by Dolly” (Kirkpatrick)—and challenged the entire American workforce’s treatment of women. “9 to 5” is an unapologetic portrait of female workers in the 1970s that details the narrator’s daily mistreatment by male coworkers and limited opportunities for career growth. Lyrics such as “They let you dream just to watch ’em shatter / You’re just a step on the bossman’s ladder” acted as both a rallying cry for the female workforce and a direct criticism of workplace misogyny (Parton). Parton’s narrative lyrical style allowed audiences to relate to the narrator as a character embodying this struggle, similar to the narrator in the 1973 hit “Jolene” conveying feelings of relational inadequacy (Vitale). As a result, listeners felt connected to both Parton’s message and the singer personally. The song accompanied a movie of the same name. In the 1980 comedy film “9 to 5,” Parton stars as an office secretary who, along with her fellow female coworkers, abducts her abusive boss and keeps him captive to prevent him from further workplace harassment (Baughan).
In its day, the “9 to 5” movie was largely received as a humorous female fantasy that expanded upon Parton’s social criticism (Baughan). This was primarily achieved through the concept of sisterhood. In a dissertation on women in country music, Haynes writes that sisterhood as a rhetorical tool evokes “emotional bonds among women that stem from their common experiences, unique perspectives, and often, collective activism” (Haynes). By portraying a community of women with a common male enemy, both the song and movie “9 to 5” accessed a deeper narrative that shifted female audiences onto the same side of a figurative battlefield. In this way, Parton’s work simultaneously cultivated audience loyalty to the moral issue of workplace misogyny and other women in American society.
The 1990s, in country music, were defined by female powerhouses such as Shania Twain, Martina McBride, and the Chicks, extending into the 2000s through Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood. As female representation became more widespread, these artists’ music became outright battle cries for American women. Hits included Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” Wynona Judd’s “Girls With Guitars,” and the violent and controversial “Independence Day” by Martina McBride. Occasionally mistaken for a song celebrating the titular holiday, “Independence Day” juxtaposes patriotic and Christian imagery with the story of a woman who burned down the home of her abusive husband. Its accusatory tone targets the moral hypocrisy of people who support freedom but turn a blind eye to domestic violence, using an extreme and sensational narrative to draw attention to this deeper message. However, the exact outcome of this narrative is ambiguous. While the lyrics describing that the firemen “just put out the flames / and took down some names” may connote a murder investigation, the song’s music video includes a shot of the woman dropping a lit match into her own lap (Haynes). This choice leads audiences to question if the woman’s newfound “independence” was from her husband, through his murder, or from the confines of a life lived in fear. At the song’s close, McBride addresses the audience directly, saying “Now I ain’t sayin’ it’s right or it’s wrong / but maybe it’s the only way” (McBride). In an interview, songwriter Gretchen Peters explained, “I’m not telling you it should be what happens; I’m telling you what happened to this particular family” (Liptak). Haynes writes that “Independence Day” successfully pairs traditional American values with the necessity of freeing women from oppression (Haynes), reaching an audience of country music fans that take these values seriously. In the following years, McBride became a spokesperson for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and the Tulsa Domestic Violence and Intervention Services, and often joined with Peters for fundraising initiatives (Ortega). Like the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s, a significant limitation of the feminist movement within country music was its lack of diversity, and in many cases, outright racism. “Hillbilly music,” country music’s earliest American ancestor, was only recorded by white artists, despite the influence of Black artists “Tee-Tot” Payne and Lesley Riddle (Beekman). Today, only 3 of the Country Music Hall of Fame’s 139 artists identify as Black. During the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, The Chicks—formerly The Dixie Chicks—and the band Lady Antebellum faced backlash for releasing music under names that were tied to slavery in the American South. Both bands decided to change their names to “The Chicks” and “Lady A,” respectively. However, the name Lady A was already in use by a 61-year-old Black blues singer, and Lady Antebellum’s name change only further buried her legacy (Millman). CMA reported that from 2014 to 2019, country music saw a 55% growth within the “African American population.” The reality of country music’s diversity has existed from the beginning into today. While the industry was almost certainly aware of this diversity, it continued to elevate white artists almost exclusively, costing the genre and the feminist movement a greater impact. However, in the article “Country music: An ugly past and troublesome present,” Millman argues that the stereotype for white country music fans—“poor, uneducated, old-fashioned” (Millman) cannot fulfill the role of scapegoat for racism within the genre. Millman writes that this classist assumption “curtails accountability, because ignoring the fact that all white people benefit from and take part in sustaining the myth of white supremacy ends up reinforcing it” (Millman). The responsibility for the racist exclusion of Black country artists belongs, in some capacity, to the entire industry and all listeners.
Earl Really Had to Die
Influenced by artists such as Kitty Wells, Dolly Parton, and contemporary Martina McBride, The Chicks combined some of country music’s most successful rhetoric to condemn domestic violence in “Goodbye Earl.” Like Wells’s “It Wasn’t God …,” “Goodbye Earl” began life as a song written by an industry insider designed to attract audiences through the novelty of female participation in a male dominated narrative. In the case of “Goodbye Earl,” this narrative was the murder ballad. This subgenre can be traced back to medieval Ireland, where real murders were dramatized in song. The folk song “Knoxville Girl” was one such song that traveled to America with Irish immigrants and later received an all-American name change. The lyrics tell the story of a man named Willy who brutally murders his lover, who is occasionally pregnant depending on the version (Haynes). Later songs included Willie Nelson’s 1975 song “Red Headed Stranger,” in which a grieving widower kills a young woman for attempting to steal his dead wife’s horse, and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” from 1968, where the singer describes murdering a nameless man “just to watch him die” (Cash). Women were often victims in popular murder ballads but never killers. This changed with Garth Brooks’s 1990 hit “The Thunder Rolls,” in which a woman shoots her adulterous husband. With a music video highlighting the husband’s domestic abuse as well as his betrayal, “The Thunder Rolls” rocketed to intense popularity through intense controversy and discourse (Haynes). This set the stage for further exploration of the female killer trope in murder ballads. By subverting audience expectations of a violent male killer and a helpless female victim, “Goodbye Earl” effectively shifts the power dynamic in favor of domestic violence survivors. In a genre where the woman so often dies at the end, “Goodbye Earl” allows Wanda to reach safety and freedom while Earl receives the death sentence in her place. Within the context of the murder ballad genre, Earl’s murder serves as a device to solidify the song’s role reversal rather than a solution the band is promoting to directly combat domestic violence.
However, unlike Brooks’s sensitive cowboy image, The Chicks were marketed as spunky and feminine, inadvertently employing the rhetoric of sisterhood to craft an even more powerful message. Much like the antagonist in the Dolly Parton movie “9 to 5” was thwarted by a group of female coworkers, Earl from “Goodbye Earl” meets his demise through the friendship of Mary Anne and Wanda (The Chicks). The message that women can achieve social justice through teamwork unconsciously positions “Goodbye Earl” within a greater body of American feminist work that its audiences were already aware of and connected to. This concept is again reflected in the band itself: three women in their 20s wearing brightly colored clothes in the Southern aesthetic. The Chicks’s sisterhood attracted female audiences for the simple joy of experiencing music created by an all-woman band. Their original name, The Dixie Chicks, may have also cultivated pride in the American South as another unifying value. When paired with “Goodbye Earl”’s existing narrative of a female friendship overcoming the challenge of domestic abuse, the end message became a call for social justice spoken by women, to women. Unlike the original male performer, The Chicks elevated “Goodbye Earl” beyond its original intent by emphasizing the concept of sisterhood, allowing it to resonate with female audiences in a more impactful way.
Like Martina McBride’s “Independence Day,” Goodbye Earl combines a core value of its listeners—sisterhood—with a sensational and violent narrative to grab audiences’ attention and condemn the issue of domestic violence in America. However, a key difference from “Independence Day” is the dark humor that “Goodbye Earl” includes in its depiction of Earl’s murder. Where Independence Day presents a grisly narrative with somber gravity and an unclear resolution, “Goodbye Earl” is an ironic victory song about a manic feminine revenge fantasy. By including this tone difference, “Goodbye Earl” draws its message away from the bleakness of real-life domestic abuse to celebrate the importance of female friendship. In the process, it may understate the realistic and devastating outcomes of domestic violence. However, it sacrifices this point in favor of greater playability among audiences searching for a fun and perhaps humorous song to enjoy with their friends, reaching a greater number of listeners in the process. Where “Goodbye Earl” reached #8 on Billboard’s singles chart, “Independence Day” ascended no higher than #12. On Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 best country music songs of all time, “Independence Day” is number 45, and “Goodbye Earl” is number 23. Here, the less true-to-life song is also the more beloved due to its focus on collective feminine victory rather than the inescapable defeat of one individual.
Goodbye, Earl
Through sisterhood, dark humor, and a good-old-fashioned happy ending, The Chicks’s “Goodbye Earl” solidified itself as an influential member of a greater feminist legacy within country music. Today, audiences continue to attend Chicks concerts and enjoy one of the band’s most famous songs. With the rise of queer country icons such as Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan, a romantic interpretation of the female friendship in “Goodbye Earl” may be worthy of further research. In the song, Mary Anne travels across the country to rescue Wanda, and they eventually find happiness living on a farm together. In Chappell Roan’s SNL performance of her newly released song “The Giver,” she sings, “only a woman can treat a woman right” (Olson). As the societal concept of female solidarity against the patriarchy shifts towards a growing disillusionment with male partnership (Padilla), the narrative of Wanda finding true love with her friend Mary Anne—rather than with the toxic Earl—may evolve into a more significant and culturally relevant interpretation. In the future, “Goodbye Earl” could not only symbolize a call for social justice but also represent a collective feminine “goodbye” to the restrictive norms of traditional, heteronormative partnerships, as American women seek alternative paths to live life on their own terms.
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Playlist
“Goodbye Earl” – The Chicks
“Any Man of Mine” – Shania Twain
“The Thunder Rolls” – Garth Brooks
“Independence Day” – Martina McBride
“Standing Outside the Fire” – Garth Brooks
“Red Headed Stranger” – Willie Nelson
“Jolene” – Dolly Parton
“Mama’s Broken Heart” – Miranda Lambert
“Before He Cheats” – Carrie Underwood
“I Will Always Love You” – Whitney Houston
“9 to 5” – Dolly Parton
“Man! I Feel Like A Woman” – Shania Twain
“The Giver” – Chappell Roan
“Here You Come Again” – Dolly Parton
“Wide Open Spaces” – The Chicks
“Old Town Road” – Lil Nas X
“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” – Kitty Wells