Martina McBride’s impassioned vocal work on the “issue” songs Independence Day and Broken Wing has sharply delineated her from peers even in a group of female Nashville singers not noted for dodging controversy.
Today’s mainstream country radio is seen as less adventurous than when Independence Day was released in the early ’90s, but McBride says she thinks the song faced more difficult prospects when it came out than it would if it were released today.
“It was really the first song of the type, you know?” she says, meaning the first by a woman. “Since then, I guess we’ve had a few ‘issue’ songs, but, well, actually none about domestic violence.”
Most country fans will recall that Independence Day had to do with the death of an abusive husband in a fire that his battered wife and daughter survived. McBride says that at the time she “never really knew” if the song would be a single. “I always hoped it would be because I really thought it would make a difference to people, but it was very, very high risk.”
She applauds RCA to this day for releasing it. She recalls that the single engendered “a lot of controversy.
“There were a lot of radio stations that never played the song at all,” she recalls. “People think it was a No. 1 song, but really it only went to No. 10 because a lot of stations just wouldn’t play it.
“I think it was really a brave move, especially for a record company. Their vision and belief in the music really paid off — not necessarily in a financial way but, I mean, I still get letters about Independence Day every day. And the company that did the video still gets three or four requests every single week from, like, police groups and school groups wanting to show it as an educational piece.
“It made a very big impact.”
Perhaps one measurement of its effect on the market was that McBride’s more recent Broken Wing, a subtler song of domestic abuse that is on McBride’s current CD (Evolution), was universally accepted by mainstream country stations.
