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| Birth Name(s) : Emily Robison |
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Full Emily Robison Biography
Emily Robison (born August 16, 1972) is a succesful American country songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning female country rock band the Dixie Chicks.
Emily Robison was born Emily Burns Erwin in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Parents Paul Erwin and Barbara Trask moved the family to the northern suburban town of Addison, Texas on the edge of Dallas Texas, where she was raised with her two older sisters, Julia, and Martha. Her mother, a private school teacher nurtured the growing interest that both Emily and Martha, (nicknamed Martie) shared, and together both sisters became proficient on several stringed instruments while in elementary school. Martie, speaking years later in their documentary Shut Up and Sing joked that Emily was better than her at the fiddle and because she wanted to remain with the violin, that she forced Emily to learn something else. Emily responded by mastering the five string banjo. Jane Frost is Director of the Patsy Montana Museum and Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield Kansas and says she watched as the sisters grew older, teaming up with friends Sharon and Troy Gilchrist, and by 1983, the foursome were touring in a teenage bluegrass group they named the Blue Night Express, while Emily was still attending private Greenhill School in Addison, Texas.
In 1989, after years of attending bluegrass festivals and busking where they could, Emily joined her sister Martie, guitarist Robin Lynn Macy, and bass player Laura Lynch. The four took the name the Dixie Chicks after a song by Lowell George of Little Feat, "Dixie Chicken", playing what was predominantly bluegrass and a beguiling mix of country standards. Frost, again at Winfield recalls being privy to the discussion that the four women had about a the possibility of a successful career as musicians together. Martie felt they could do well. Robin said, ".. It's going to be a 'hot' band," to which Emily responded, "I give it six months, and if we aren't making money by then, I'm out of here!" Plenty of regular festival attendees remembered the foursome. In 1989 when festival promoter Bob Redford, at the Walnut Valley Festival found he had an open slot on stage six, Santa Fe Trails Productions' Leo Eilts was asked if he knew of a band to fill the space, and suggested the Chicks. Upon learning of what he believes was their first paid performance, Eilts says, "Laura promptly threw up". However, the women did play-- backed by himself and another musician for moral support. The young women began to take to the road in earnest.
By 1993, the band had evolved into a new direction. Macy left the group for a "purer" bluegrass sound. Lynch, thrust into the position of sole lead singer, was replaced by the sisters in 1995 with singer composer Natalie Maines after the group was unable to garner anything more than local interest.Robison in concert with the Chicks, 2003.
Emily became proficient in vocal harmony, and plays the banjo, dobro, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, papoose, accordion, and sitar.
May 1, 1999, Emily married country singer Charlie Robison. During their courtship, Martie wrote the romantic hit song, "Cowboy Take Me Away". Emily's name was changed after their marriage to Emily Robison.
The Robisons have three children: Charles Augustus, called "Gus", born November 11, 2002 and twins Julianna Tex (9:19pm ,6 lb 10 oz) and Henry Benjamin (9:29pm, 6 lb 14 oz), born on April 14, 2005. All three children were conceived via invitro fertilization They reside on a ranch near Bandera, Texas northwest of San Antonio, Texas.
Robison has been frank about the fact that she and her husband used IVF to conceive their three children, saying "we were under the naïve assumption that once we started we’d be pregnant the first month. When it didn’t work that way, I was in shock,” and that she had mild endometriosis, “but nothing that would have kept me from getting pregnant.” Martie and Emily both shared the same difficulty, which they found perplexing, because their elder sister Julia, and other family members never experienced infertility. Both discuss the difficulties of planning for a family while touring, but are acutely aware of their good fortune with choices that other women would find financially prohibitive. The Dixie Chick song "So Hard" tells of Robison's and Maguire's view on their struggle. |
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