New Tour Revisits 20th Anniversary of Country Music Trio’s Response to Controversy About Wartime Remark

Twenty-three years ago, a single remark by one of country music's biggest acts, The Chicks, then known as The Dixie Chicks, led to significant controversy. Now, with the announcement of a tour marking the 20th Anniversary of the release of the group's response album that included the song "Still Not Ready to Make Nice," the trio is revisiting that moment.

The group announced the tour on May 27 and has scheduled sixteen dates from September 30 to November 2 at various venues around the United States.

In March 2003, ten days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, singer Natalie Maines told a London audience "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."

The backlash was swift. Country radio stations pulled The Chicks from rotation. Fans organized public boycotts, and the group found itself at the center of a debate about celebrity speech, wartime patriotism, and the boundaries of artistic expression in a genre with deep ties to military service and national identity.

The cultural moment mattered partly because of its timing. The comments came less than two years after the September 11 attacks, at a time when the nation was still processing and responding to history-making events.

The response from the recording industry told a different story than the radio silence. The Dixie Chicks' "Taking the Long Way," a 2006 album that included the song "Not Ready to Make Nice," earned multi-platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America, selling more than two million copies in the United States. At the 2007 Grammy Awards, it won five awards, including Album of the Year — a striking outcome.

The Chicks have noted in relatively interviews that fans frequently connect the song to experiences that have nothing to do with George W. Bush or Iraq — professional humiliation, family estrangement, social pressure to apologize for things they don't regret. The song, written in a political context, has become something more personal.

Listeners of the song today who might disagree with Maines' original remarks can still find themselves inside the song — not because the politics have been forgotten, but because the emotional core of the lyric - the refusal to perform contrition you don't feel - is recognizable across a wide range of human experience.