Sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire Charted Their Own Course 15 Years Ago with Court Yard Hounds

After the tumult and triumph of Taking the Long Way, there really wasn’t anywhere else to go.

For the Dallas-raised sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, the direction that made the most sense was heading west.

The then-Dixie Chicks had emerged from the bruising aftermath of Natalie Maines’ infamous 2003 comment about being ashamed of coming from the same state as then-President George W. Bush. The trio poured its emotions into the band’s masterful seventh studio album, 2006’s Taking the Long Way, which yielded five Grammys and sold over three million copies.

The trio took a hiatus in 2008, and just a year later, Maguire and Strayer formed the band Court Yard Hounds. (Maines would eventually dabble in a solo project of her own, Mother, which arrived in 2013.)

The duo’s self-titled debut marks its 15th anniversary this year. It was a project that came together swiftly. Strayer, reeling from her recent divorce from fellow Texas singer-songwriter Charlie Robison, and Maguire co-produced the dozen tracks with Jim Scott at Maguire’s home studio in Austin. (Court Yard Hounds made its live debut at 2010’s South by Southwest, sticking close to home.)

Anyone pressing play on Court Yard Hounds was not greatly startled: What’s here is a country-rock very much cut from the Dixie Chicks’ cloth, albeit skewing less Hill Country and more Pacific Coast Highway, tinged with a touch of defiance.

“To be honest, I don’t know where we fit,” Strayer told The New York Times’ Jon Pareles in 2010. “Whoever wants to play it, great, but we’re not necessarily going to work country radio. We’ve been burned so badly. There’s definitely some country-sounding things on here, and I’m not going to stop making music I like to make. But at the same time, I’m not going back to a place that’s not a comfortable place for me.”
Yet for all the tension, there’s an appealing freshness and sense of escape coursing through these songs. The lead single, “The Coast,” might make listeners do a double-take — it evokes prime Sheryl Crow — but elsewhere, the alchemy of the sibling harmonies is unmistakably the Hounds.

Contemporary critics, unsurprisingly, found it difficult to listen to the record without wondering how it would’ve functioned as a Dixies Chicks project: “If the album represents the new direction that they’re taking, without or preferably with Maines, that makes Court Yard Hounds far more valuable than the average side project,” wrote Slant Magazine.

Ironically, Maguire and Strayer wouldn’t have much opportunity, initially, to promote their side project, as the Chicks were drafted to open a string of dates for the Eagles’ stadium tour in 2010, as the veteran rockers supported their recently released new album, Long Road Out of Eden.

Maguire and Strayer would return to Court Yard Hounds for one more studio album, 2013’s Amelita, which, to this day, stands as the final release from the pair. Maguire and Strayer guested on Don Henley’s country-inclined Cass County in 2015, alongside Ashley Monroe, but the day job came calling in 2016.

The Chicks reformed, mounting an enormously successful comeback tour in 2016 and eventually stripping the “Dixie” from their name in 2020. They were on the cusp of releasing Gaslighter, their first album in 14 years.

Side projects are, by nature, evanescent, but in scratching an itch to make music, Strayer and Maguire inadvertently created an urge to hear more, even as their more prominent band (rightly) pulled focus and forced Court Yard Hounds into an indefinite hiatus. In time, perhaps, the sisters will once again hunger for a detour, an escape or simply a change in scenery.

Until then, fans of Court Yard Hounds will have to take solace in the handful of songs that do exist — and have aged spectacularly well.