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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

5/28/2003

They'd Like to Thank the Academy
Here's a guest post from Nashville music critic Brian Mansfield, who writes for USA Today and CDNow. I'm hoping Mansfield - who was my editor at New Country magazine back during the mid-1990s country music boom - will soon join the small cadre of contributors to this blog. Mansfield examines whether the backlash over Dixie Chick Natalie Maines' comments critical of President Bush is over:

Last week's Academy of Country Music award winners generally got boosts in the marketplace. Toby Keith's Unleashed saw a week-to-week sales increase of 25.5 percent (32,198 to 40,397). Award recipients Kenny Chesney, Martina McBride, Alan Jackson, Lonestar, George Strait, Emerson Drive and Rascal Flatts saw double-digit percentage increases as well.

Conventional wisdom says a televised performance slot is as important as a win come awards-show time. For some, like Montgomery Gentry and LeAnn Rimes it was - 36.9 percent and 23.6 percent increases respectively - but that didn't turn out to be the case for the Dixie Chicks. The group also proved that any publicity isn't necessarily good publicity as they turned the launch of what was generally perceived as a conciliatory single - the lullaby "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)" - into a petulant shot at Toby Keith. Sales of their album Home dropped another 3.5 percent, reaching a new weekly low of 21,482.
Hmmm. Guess the backlash is still ... uhh.... lashing.