"Just so you know,” Maines addressed the audience from the stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London that night, “we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas."
Maines was quoted in a review of the concert that appeared in The Guardian on March 12. The comment quickly became fodder for a grassroots anti-Dixie Chicks backlash. It began with thousands of phone calls flooding country-music radio stations from Denver to Nashville—calls demanding that the Dixie Chicks be removed from the stations' playlists. Soon some of those same stations were calling for a boycott of the Dixie Chicks' music (their most recent album, Home, was then sitting at number one on the Billboardtop country Albums chart while their single “Travelin’ Soldier” was at number one on the country singles chart), and of their upcoming U.S. tour.
Right-wing blogs and talk shows vilified the Dixie Chicks as unpatriotic and worse. A website site statement from Maines said, "I feel the president is ignoring the opinion of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world. We've been overseas for several weeks and have been reading and following the news accounts of our government's position. The anti-American sentiment that has unfolded here is astounding. My comments were made in frustration, and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view." She apologized to President Bush for being "disrespectful" to his office, but added, "I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers' lives are lost."
Such sentiments were not good enough for the knee-jerk reactionaries who dominate America’s country music industry. The Dixie Chicks, who had only weeks before won three Grammy Awards and sung the national anthem at the Super Bowl in San Diego, had already become pariahs.
Within days of the report of Maines’ statement, songs by the Dixie Chicks virtually disappeared from American airwaves. "Travelin' Soldier" plummeted from the number one spot on the Country chart to number 63. The band’s cover of the Stevie Nicks song "Landslide" fell sharply from number 10 down to number 43 on the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart in one week, and was off the chart entirely the following week. The band’s two previous albums, Wide Open Spaces(1998) and Fly (1999), had each been certified "diamond" for shipping more than 10 million copies in the United States. Without airplay, Home stalled that March at six million.
One station in Kansas City, Missouri, held a Dixie "chicken toss" party Friday morning, where Chick critics were encouraged to dump the group's CDs and concert tickets into trash cans.
Houston country station KILT pulled the band's records from its playlist after 77% of people polled on its website said they supported the move.
"People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas' own have attacked the state and the president," said KILT program director Jeff Garrison.
The Lipton Tea Company, which had been sponsoring the Dixie Chicks’ tour, dropped the band.
Protesters showed up outside concerts. "We have video footage of this lady at one of the shows protesting, holding her two-year-old son," according to Maines. The woman commanded her child to shout along with an angry chant. "And I was just like, that's it right there. That's the moment that it's taught. She just taught her two-year-old how to hate. And that broke my heart."
The band received death threats, including at least one, in Dallas, that the FBI considered credible. A newspaper printed Natalie Maines's home address in Austin, Texas, and she ended up moving first outside the city and then to Los Angeles.
Other country artists were no less unfriendly. Travis Tritt bashed the Dixie Chicks from the stage, while Toby Keith famously joined the fray by performing in front of a backdrop that featured an enormous image of Natalie Maines beside Saddam Hussein.
One exception to the list of Dixie Chicks opponents was country music veteran Merle Haggard, who in the summer of 2003 released a song, “America First”, critical of U.S. media coverage of the Iraq War. On July 25, 2003, the Associated Press reported him saying:
“I don't even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching.”
The economic and emotional impact of “The Incident” on the members of the Dixie Chicks is the focus of the 2006 documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing. The film captures a scene in which the Dixie Chicks' public relations manager is counseling Maines not to speak her mind too openly about President Bush in an upcoming interview with Diane Sawyer. "I'll tell you why," says the earnest media handler. "He's got sky-high approval. The war couldn't be going better. By the time this interview airs... the looting will be done, the rebuilding of Iraq will be started.... Two weeks from now, it's going to be even a more positive situation."
Save for several appearances with other artists on the anti-Bush “Rock the Vote” tour in 2004, the Dixie Chicks remained well below the radar until 2006, when their album, Taking the Long Way, was released. The first single, “Not Ready to Make Nice”, was a musical flip of the bird to their critics: “I’m not ready to back down / I’m still as mad as hell.”
The Dixie Chicks and their manager insisted to their record company that "we need to approach everything like not one radio station is going to play one single song," Maines recalls. Asked at the time about the band’s new music’s prospects at country radio stations, she said, "Do you really think we're going to make an album for you and trust the future of our career to people who turned on us in a day?"
By then, though, many in the audience had changed their own tune. At the time of the album’s release, approval for President Bush had dropped to a dismal 29 percent, in large part because of Americans’ frustration with the war in Iraq.
Taking the Long Way debuted at number one on both the U.S. pop albums chart and the U.S. country albums chart, selling 526,000 copies in the first week, despite having little or no airplay in areas that had once embraced them. Both "Not Ready to Make Nice" and the album’s second single, "Everybody Knows," were largely ignored by country radio and performed poorly on the country singles chart.
It was surely some kind of vindication when the Dixie Chicks won five Grammy Awards in 2007, including the award for Album of the Year for Taking the Long Way and Song of the Year and Record of the Year for “Not Ready to Make Nice.”
The Dixie Chicks have recorded and performed only sporadically in the years since “The Incident.” In December 2012, Natalie Maines announced that she would be releasing her first solo album on May 7, 2013. The album, entitled Mother, will be promoted as a rock album and not serviced to country music radio.