The history behind the backlash against the Chicks, which still shapes country music today

The Chicks are on tour this fall to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their seminal album Taking the Long Way (including an Oct. 7 show at the Met). They’ve released an expanded edition of the album, and they’re playing it in its entirety to sold-out crowds across the nation.

The album deserves this anniversary treatment because it was the trio’s answer to the firestorm of criticism they faced after lead singer Natalie Maines spoke out against Republican President George W. Bush and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Her comments ignited a wave of protests that knocked the group from the pinnacle of their country careers with stunning speed and shocking violence. Being “Dixie Chicked” became country music speak for being canceled (before the term really entered into the American lexicon), and Maines even received death threats.

This backlash represented more than a simple grassroots expression of wartime jingoism. The protests erupted because of a decades-long connection between country music and the U.S. military, one that intensified in the post-9/11 political climate. This history explains why country fans felt betrayed by Maines’s mild expression of dissent — and makes clear why the Chicks maintain a contentious relationship with the country music industry, even as they remain one of the genre’s most influential, innovative and successful artists of the past three decades.

The country music industry’s relationship with the Department of Defense dates to the early years of the Cold War. In the 1950s, leaders from the country music business partnered with the U.S. Armed Forces to book their artists in military installations around the world.

Grandpa Jones, an eventual mainstay of the Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw, toured the front lines of the Korean War to play his banjo and sing for tens of thousands of U.S. and U.N. troops. Other artists like Jimmy Dean, Hank Williams and Roy Acuff toured the world to bring country’s “down-home” entertainment to the ranks, making country fans out of skeptical service members and foreign civilians along the way.

While the country music business promoted its artists on military installations around the globe, the military used country music to fill its ranks with new recruits. In the mid-1950s, the U.S. Army and Air Force Recruiting Service enlisted the help of famed Nashville producer Owen Bradley to create a recruitment television show where country stars hyped enlistment.

The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) also helped promote country music to service members and international audiences. During the 1960s, AFRTS gradually increased the amount of country music on its global network of stations, and listeners began buying more country records. By late in the decade, Nashville could count on selling $4 million (around $40 million in 2026) worth of records per year to U.S. service members stationed in Europe.

Given the industry’s burgeoning ties to the military and the prevailing spirit of anticommunism, country artists routinely produced patriotic songs that sang the praises of the military. In the early days of the Cold War, Hank Williams scolded Josef Stalin with “No, No, Joe,” and Grandpa Jones emphatically sang, “I’m No Communist.”

Even in the 1960s, as rock music questioned authority and the Vietnam War, country artists continued singing patriotic songs espousing political and social conservatism. In 1969, Merle Haggard released “Okie from Muskogee,” which painted the singer and, by extension, country fans, as small-town conservatives who would never smoke marijuana, burn their draft cards or disrespect authority like the counterculture and peace movement. Although Haggard’s actual politics did not align with this reactionary stance, his follow-up single “Fightin’ Side of Me” threatened violence on anyone who dared question the righteousness of U.S. anticommunist strategies.

The political messages of these releases, along with the lucrative business ties between Music Row and the Pentagon, made country music the sound of American patriotism during the Cold War. While songs like Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam” offered nuanced critiques of the human costs of the Vietnam War, country musicians did not produce anything approaching the full throated anti-war anthems heard in rock and soul.

In the 1970s, artists like Tennessee Ernie Ford and Roy Clark doubled down on displays of Cold War patriotism by touring the Soviet Union to promote democratic capitalism with banjos, fiddles and songs about the virtues of the American way of life.

But it was in the 1980s when country music’s patriotic reputation hit overdrive. In 1984, Lee Greenwood recorded “God Bless the USA,” at the height of Ronald Reagan’s renewal of Cold War patriotism. It quickly became a staple of nationalistic ceremonies and conservative politics. In 1988, George H.W. Bush embraced the singer and his song on the campaign trail, as well as during Operation Desert Storm.

While country music’s politics were less pronounced in the 1990s, listeners could still hear the familiar themes in patriotic anthems like Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Some Gave All.”

The 9/11 terrorist attacks kicked the country music industry’s patriotism back into high gear. While the outpouring of pro-America sentiment in the days after the attack instantly revived Greenwood’s career, other Nashville music stars rushed to their studios to fulfill what seemed to be an expected patriotic duty for Music Row. Their releases included everything from Alan Jackson’s reflective “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” to Toby Keith’s acerbic “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).”

Yet, the Chicks — at the time the biggest group in country music—adopted a strategy more in the tradition of those country artists like Loretta Lynn who had subtly questioned the Vietnam War. In late 2002, they released “Travelin’ Soldier.” Written by Bruce Robison, the song told the tale of a doomed soldier heading to Vietnam and his fleeting romance with a teenage waitress. Despite the historical setting, no one could miss the connection to the then-current war raging in Afghanistan and the impending deployment of troops to Iraq.

The song’s mixed messaging allowed country fans to consume it without any political hesitation, and “Travelin’ Soldier” shot to number one on the Billboard country chart.

Everything changed in an instant for the Chicks, however, after they took to the stage in London, England, on March 10, 2003, just days before American troops invaded Iraq. Before playing Travelin’ Soldier, Maines made the anti-war subtext abundantly clear. “We do not want this war, this violence,” she told the Londoners, “and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

It took about a week for the news to reach in the U.S., but the report of Maines’ comments produced an explosive reaction from enraged country fans. At Bossier City, Louisiana, for example, a 33,000-lb. tractor rolled over a parking lot, and crushed hundreds of Dixie Chicks CDs (the group changed its name in 2020). In other cities, protesters filled dumpsters and lit bonfires to dispose of the band’s merchandise. Country radio programmers blacklisted the Chicks overnight.

The anti-Chicks protests revealed how much the politics of country music had fused with the brand of patriotic conservatism that had become associated with the Republican Party in recent decades. The long history of country music’s connection to the military further cemented this connection.

Country music fans — primed for decades to expect patriotism laced into their favorite songs — would broach no dissent. They saw the Chicks’ criticism of the Iraq invasion as not only a betrayal of the genre, but an existential threat to the nation itself.

Yet, the backlash was far from the end of the trio’s success. Over the past 20 years, they have attracted new fans and emerged as heroes of political authenticity in an industry that seems to demand its artists take an apolitical vow. They have inspired a new generation of outspoken female country stars like Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris and Kacey Musgraves — all of whom have pushed against a male-dominated industry that prefers the political silences that keep the cash registers ringing. For these young women, the Chicks are not pariahs; they are heroes.

As the trio continues to sell out concerts, they have shown a way to exist in two worlds at once. They are completely country in their musical style, but something beyond that as well.

To forge that path, they had to shake off the expectations of an industry and a fanbase primed to hear unshakeable support for the government’s military missions. That 50-year history turned Maines’s offhand comment from a London stage into a declaration of political and artistic independence.

Joseph M. Thompson is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University and author of Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.