Songfacts®:

• Martie Maguire (then Martie Siedel), wrote this song with Nashville scribe Marcus Hummon ("Born To Fly") about her sister and bandmate Emily Robison's boyfriend, Charlie. On the VH1 show Storytellers, Martie stated, "[Emily] had been dating a bunch of guys I didn't approve of, and then she met Charlie and I sort of pictured him whisking her off into the sunset."
  
  Emily and Charlie eventually married in 1999, the same year the single dropped, but divorced in 2008. Emily married musician Martin Strayer in 2013. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Katie - Woodland Hills, CA
• This song made a huge impact on the pre-teen Taylor Swift. Writing in a 2019 Elle UK essay about the role that pop music has played in her life, Swift recalled:
  
  "To this day, when I hear 'Cowboy Take Me Away' by the Dixie Chicks, I instantly recall the feeling of being 12 years old, sitting in a little wood-paneled room in my family home in Pennsylvania.
  
  I'm clutching a guitar and learning to play the chords and sing the words at the same time, rehearsing for a gig at a coffee house."
• The song's title came from a well-known slogan used in commercials for Calgon bath lotion.
• Pop-rock singer Lissie covered this on her 2019 album When I'm Alone: The Piano Retrospective. She told Songfacts why the song was special to her: "In high school I listened to a lot of country music, and I went and saw [the Dixie Chicks] play in the arena in the area I lived, and 'Cowboy Take Me Away,' I just remember that song coming out and loving it. Also at the time, there was a guy I liked and he had a kind of cowboy vibe. I grew up in a small city, but there were kids who were rural, a lot of people with pickup trucks and country music. There's that idea of being out in open spaces away from the city with this man to sweep you off your feet."