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Danny Shirley says he and the band he formed more than 30 years ago are under fire, all because of their name. Confederate Railroad, who earned a 1993 Grammy nomination for their hit “Trashy Women,” had their performances at two local fairs in Illinois and New York canceled last month.

In New York, the Ulster County executive’s office is at odds with the county’s agricultural society over who exactly disinvited Confederate Railroad from the Ulster County Fair. But in the Illinois case, the decision to nix the band from the DuQuoin State Fair lineup came from Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose office cited the administration’s stance that state resources not be used to “to promote symbols of racism.” Namely the small Confederate flag that is visible on the group’s logo, a historic Civil War-era steam locomotive known as “The General.”

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But Shirley, 63, says the real reason for their ouster is because of the band’s moniker.

“The first indication that there was a problem was they had my agent get in touch with me and said they wanted me to make a statement as to why the band was named Confederate Railroad,” says Shirley of the Illinois incident. “I said, ‘Well, OK,’ and typed out a statement and sent it to them. Then they canceled the show a few days later.”

Rolling Stone sat with Shirley at his publicist’s office outside of Nashville to talk about the controversy, what he’s learned, and why he’ll never change his group’s name.

This has been a strange summer for you and your band…

It is strange. Especially with us being together for so many years and having that name and it never being an issue. But the thing that makes this different, in Illinois, it was the government that shut us down. It wasn’t that there was a groundswell of people that were offended by Confederate Railroad. You had one political blogger bring it up: “Is it right to have a band named Confederate Railroad at the state fair in the land of Lincoln?” We’ve already played there twice over the years and everything went fine. Nowadays, it feels like they’re looking for something to go off about.

The Illinois fair canceled the performance after you explained the origin of Confederate Railroad’s name. How did you find out you were off the bill?

The fair manager and [our agent] were talking back and forth and I said, “What I would like to do is talk to the people who made the decision and get their side of the story about why it was made, and maybe we can put out a joint statement and calm everything down.” Because they got so much backlash there. They said, “That sounds like a great idea, we’ll talk Monday” after the meeting they were having. We got a call on Monday saying their legal counsel had advised them not to make any further statements.

The governor came out saying it’s because we use the [Confederate] flag, but that’s not even true. We don’t use it as a backdrop, we don’t hang it from the rafters, or the front of the stage. On our T-shirts there’s a part of the flag on there, but when we’re playing venues where there is a policy on that, we just don’t sell T-shirts. It’s not like it was in the Seventies when all the Southern bands flew the flag. The attitude in the country is a lot different than then. I listen to these people and I don’t want to offend nobody, so we just won’t sell it… It would be different if a band was coming out today called the “Good Ol’ Boys Confederate Band From the South.” I wouldn’t recommend anybody doing that.