Songfacts®:

• "Goodbye Earl" has got to be the most lighthearted song ever made about domestic abuse and justified homicide. The song tells the story of a woman (Wanda) who sticks around her small town and marries Earl, who quickly turns abusive. When her friend Mary Ann finds out, she helps Wanda poison Earl's peas and get rid of the body. They aren't criminal masterminds but don't get caught because Earl was a missing person who nobody missed at all.
  
  The song has all the sass and humor you'd expect from The Chicks (known at the time as The Dixie Chicks), but the song was written by a guy: Dennis Linde, best known for writing the 1972 Elvis Presley hit "Burning Love." Linde had written several songs that included a character by the name of "Earl," most notably, "The Queen Of My Double Wide Trailer" by Sammy Kershaw. "Goodbye Earl" was an effort to kill off the "Earl" character. Linde also played acoustic guitar on the song.
• Before The Chicks recorded this song, an all-male country group called Sons Of The Desert, best known for singing backup on Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance," discovered it and made it a staple of their live shows. According to that band, they recorded the song and were set to release it as a single, but their record label re-routed it to The Chicks, who included it on their 1999 album Fly and released it as a single the following year. Sons Of The Desert were signed to Epic Records and The Dixie Chicks were on Monument Records, both divisions of Sony. Sons Of The Desert ended up leaving Epic soon after.
• According to the liner notes, the "iffy harmony" vocals on the song were performed by the "Do-Wrongs," comprising the song's two co-producers - Blake Chancey and Paul Worley - plus Chicks multi-instrumentalist Emily Robison's then husband, singer-songwriter Charlie Robison.
• The song is fundamentally comedy but there's an element of tragedy mixed in, especially when Earl puts Wanda in intensive care. That's no laughing matter, but survivors of domestic abuse overwhelmingly supported the song. It did make many (mostly male) radio program directors squeamish, and many wouldn't play the song. The Chicks' first seven singles all placed no lower than #7 on the Country chart, with four of them going to #1, but "Earl" stalled at #13. The band stuck behind it, playing it at just about every show throughout their career, and the song remains one of their most popular.
• The music video was directed by Evan Bernard and stars the comedy actress Jane Krakowski (long before her successful run on 30 Rock) as Wanda, the victim of domestic abuse. NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues actor Dennis Franz plays Earl, and Lauren Holly of NCIS is Mary Ann. Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines' actor husband Adrian Pasdar plays a police officer.
  
  It won both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association Video of the Year Awards in 2000.
• "Goodbye Earl" was the fourth single from Fly, The Chicks' second consecutive Diamond-certified album for sales of over 10 million in America. This was a time when women were killing it in country music - Shania Twain, Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes were also huge. A few years later the genre got a lot more male-focused as bro-country took hold, but the Chicks retained a huge fanbase and are cited as an influence by many younger artists, including Kacey Musgraves, Kelsea Ballerini and Maren Morris.
• The record label wasn't bothered by the song's lighthearted take on murder; they were more concerned about the track "Sin Wagon," which has the girls engaging in "mattress dancing." Lead singer Natalie Maines told Entertainment Weekly: "They're scared to death about that song, and they won't talk about it in interviews. And our manager jokes, 'You can't say mattress dancing, but they love the song about premeditated first degree murder! This is okay?' So it's funny to us that mattress dancing is out and murder is in!"
• Taylor Swift is a professed Dixie Chicks fan. On August 24, 2015, during her Los Angeles stop on her 1989 World Tour, she said "Goodbye Earl" used to be he "go-to talent show song." The singer then invited Natalie Maines onstage to sing it with her.