Country fans spurn the anti-war Dixie Chicks

The Dixie Chicks make clear in the signature song from their latest album that they are not "ready to make nice". And now it seems some of the disenchanted former fans of the rambunctious country trio from Texas - who famously spoke out against President George Bush on the eve of the Iraq war - are not ready to make nice either.

The Chicks have announced that they have wiped 14 cities off the schedule of their current North American tour, replaced a number of US concert dates with Canadian ones, and pushed back other concerts scheduled for this month until later in the autumn.

The reason? Slow ticket sales, especially in the country music heartland of the South and Midwest, from Kansas City and St Louis to Memphis and Houston.

The Dixie Chicks may be topping the charts with their new CD, Taking The Long Way, and they may be going down a treat in New York, Washington and London, where they have played to sell-out crowds in the past few weeks. But it is also apparent they have not been forgiven in certain quarters for making a stand against their commander-in-chief.

Across Middle America, there are still hundreds of radio stations which refuse to play their songs. Individual fans, too, have expressed emotions ranging from unease to disgust - either because they feel politics has no place in popular music, or because they are Bush supporters who do not want to listen to the Chicks' outspoken lyrics.

"[I] used to love almost everything the Chicks sang and played, but never ever will I buy another Dixie Chicks CD," read one typical dissenting comment from an online reviewer at Amazon.com. "I have a son in the military, and we don't support those who can't respect our leaders."

Musically, the Chicks have changed too, steering away from the pure country sound of their early albums to something with a stronger rock beat - an acknowledgement, perhaps, of the changing audience for both music and lyrics.

American pop culture has been forever marked by the moment in March 2003, when the Chicks' lead singer, Natalie Maines, addressed the crowd at the Empire in Shepherd's Bush, London, and said that she was "ashamed" that President Bush was from her home state of Texas.

The London audience lapped up the line - this was less than 10 days before the start of the Iraq invasion - but by the time word of it crossed the Atlantic it triggered a different reaction.

Country music stations staged a boycott and organised publicity stunts including a ritual crushing of Dixie Chicks CDs by a tractor. Sympathisers, meanwhile, started snapping up their albums as a matter of political pride and coined the term "dixie-chicked" to refer to anyone whose publicly stated views prompted a backlash.

Some of the same emotional tension spilt out with the release of Taking the Long Way in May. Songs like "Not Ready to Make Nice" directly address the travails the trio has been through in defiant fashion. Maines declares herself "still mad as hell", and expresses consternation at the hatred she stirred up by stating her opinions.

"It's a sad story when a mother will teach her daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger," one of the verses runs. "And how in the world can the words that I said send somebody so over the edge that they'd write me a letter sayin' that I better shut up and sing or my life will be over?" Other singers and songwriters have taken an anti-Bush turn of late - among them Neil Young and the Rolling Stones - but they have a fan base far more compatible with their political beliefs. What makes the Chicks so combustible is that their bedrock appeal is in the very parts of the country that have most vociferously supported Mr Bush. That, though, is now changing. Taking The Long Way has sold a very respectable two million copies - a lot of them, though, in Canada, Australia and Britain. When the Chicks returned to the Empire recently, Maines made a crack about "the Bush we trust - Shepherd's Bush".