Faith Hill Almost Quit After CMA Awards Incident

Faith Hill photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Nashville.

September 11, 2007 — Faith Hill says the much-talked-about CMA Awards show incident, when she appeared to be upset with Carrie Underwood's Female Vocalist win, almost caused her to give up her career.

As Faith has explained, she was joking and "making fun of herself" when she cried, "What?" as Carrie's name was read, but the moment had tremendous backlash. The video of her reaction became one of YouTube's biggest sensations of 2006, being viewed more than 7 million times.

Faith tells Dial-Global that she went home having no idea how her joke had been perceived until she got a call from her friend Martina McBride, who told her that people didn't think she was joking and that she thought "this was going to be around for a while."

Faith said she hung up the phone and cried and then thought about her three daughters who had to go to school the next day with their mother being the talk of the town. "I couldn't believe it, I couldn't imagine it," she says. "So I called Carrie Underwood right away, immediately, and I let her know that it was nothing. I was not a sore loser, I was joking with the camera guy. I was making fun of myself. There are miles of tape of me doing that along my career for the 14 years I've been in this business. The camera moved away from me and I was still laughing, but no one saw that."

With Gracie, Maggie and Audrey on her mind, the next day Faith actually considered throwing in the towel on her career. "The world was unraveling right in front of me and I just wanted to quit," she says. "I called my manager and I said, 'I'm done. This is over for me. I don't need this in my life. I'm not this kind of person.' And then when my kids came home from school, I sat them down and said, 'I'm sure you've been teased or your mom's been talked about at school today.' And they go, 'Yeah, there's a lot of talk about you at school today, Mom.' I said, 'I just want you to know that I was only joking and it was never meant in a mean way and the joke was on me. I was making fun of myself.'

"And all three of them were like, 'Mom, come on, we know that, everybody knows that.' I was so thankful because I thought they were gonna get so much grief at school from my big — I don't want to say mistake — but my episode. They were gonna get the brunt of it, and that would have hurt worse than the hell that I went through, is for my kids to have gone through any kind of hell. They don't deserve it. But they were fine and they handled it in a great way."