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Hill's first single, "Wild One," stayed at No. 1 for four weeks. Since then, her repertoire has grown bolder and less country. In the process, she has alienated some of her early fans, who grouse that she has abandoned them in a quest for exposure and pop-icon status, especially with her 1999 album, Breathe. Whatever the case, Breathe proved to be a brilliant business move -- the album sold more than eight million copies. But her follow-up, the slick, L.A.-sound Cry, was panned by critics and sold less than half that.Hill has announced that her next album will be country. Right now, though, she's playing opposite Nicole Kidman as a robotic spouse in the spoof remake of the 1975 film The Stepford Wives. All this leaves no doubt that Hill, who has three daughters with her husband, country star Tim McGraw, is intent on having it all. "Yeah, I'm driven," she says. "But I will never lose sight of where I came from [and] the fact that I was once a little girl using a hairbrush for a microphone. It gives me perspective and keeps my head and my heart in the right place."
Toby Keith (and the Dixie Chicks)
When his debut single, "Should've Been a Cowboy," topped the charts in 1993, most people thought of Toby Keith as a mild-mannered youngster. But last year the former oil-field worker and rodeo hand established himself among country's most outspoken artists with "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)," a rowdy warning to terrorists.
While the song was an immediate hit, some, including Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines, took offense at the song's most incendiary line: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." "It's ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant," declared Maines, frontwoman of the crowd-pleasing trio, which has sold 28 million records since 1989.
And so began a public feud between the singers, with Keith retorting, "You've got to be in my league as a songwriter before I'll even respond." In Nashville, where stars rarely criticize each other, this was big news, and it was fueled by Maines's now-famous remark about President George W. Bush. After that, Keith blasted her again. Maines got even on national TV, wearing a shirt with a not-so-subtle message ("F.U.T.K.") that most believe was meant for Keith.
While the two have laid down their swords for the moment, the attacks drew so much publicity that some people questioned whether this was orchestrated anger, not the real thing. No, says Keith, whose "Beer for My Horses," a duet with Willie Nelson, recently climbed to No. 1. "Believe you me, there's nobody that was any madder at her than I was."
Alan Jackson
One of Nashville's last pure traditionalists, Jackson, who's sold 40 million albums in his 13-year recording career, established himself as champion of the "little man," the overlooked and forgotten blue-collar worker. But by writing and recording "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," his epic reflection on 9/11, he became a citizen of the world.
Born in Newnan, Ga., the youngest of five and the only boy, Jackson slept in a drawer as an infant. He grew up idolizing the hillbilly saint Hank Williams, with whom he shares a love of fancy western clothes. An inveterate prankster (at 9, "I got a scar on my head runnin' through a glass door, going out to the garage to get [an auto] condenser to shock my sisters"), Jackson draws on his childhood in songs such as "Chattahoochee," about the joys of small-town life.
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