Back in May, a new track by Jason Aldean entered the 10-song rotation on the "Modern Country" channel that we play at our store. It was called "Try That in a Small Town," and it sounds a lot like several other "country good, city bad" songs that have appeared from time to time...same jingoistic "respect the flag or else"-"the gummint's comin' for my huntin' rifle"-"good ol' boys are the only decent people" straw-man claptrap that I have heard before. In this case, though, it all appears in one song, sung in heavy-duty aggro mode.
Jason says that the song is about helping your neighbor and having a sense of community. But there's already a perfectly good song with that theme: "You Find Out Who Your Friends Are" by Tracy Lawrence. The best part of that song is that anybody, anywhere who has ever been down and out and been rescued by true friends can relate. But "Try That" is a definite threat, not only against big-city criminals who might try to bring their mess to Jason's town, but also anyone who might be raising awareness of police brutality, mass shootings, or the evils committed under the aegis of the American flag.
This was my problem with the song as it is, mind.
Then Came the Video!
I owe much to NPR, the Washington Post, and the "Now This News" YouTube channel for filling in the blanks for me on why everyone started calling the video--and by extension, the song--racist. I already mentioned the implied "country good, city bad" vibe; I could see that all the crime backgrounds in the video were urban. The implication was that stuff like that never happens in small towns. (This is complete bullshit; I'll get back to this statement a little later.)
But what I did not know was that when it shows Aldean singing, the background is a courthouse where a lynching took place. In 1927, an 18-year-old Black kid named Henry Choate was accused of attacking a 16-year-old white girl; allegedly, he confessed, even though the girl never named him as her assailant. A mob grabbed Henry from his jail cell, dragged him through town behind a car, and finally hung him off the courthouse balcony. The courthouse in question--the Maury County Courthouse--is located in Columbia, TN, which was the scene of a "race riot" in 1946 (this is the white-supremacist term; it was way more complicated than that, and it wasn't the Black people that started the trouble). In the 1990's, it was the venue for a so-called "Good Ol' Boys' Roundup," which featured racial slurs and a pretend lynching.
Yikes.
The company that produced the video says that Aldean did not choose the video's location, and that the Hannah Montana movie was also filmed there (though I bet she never sang any racially tone-deaf lyrics against the background of a courthouse reflecting film of burning American flags).
That may be true, but...seriously. You can Wiki both the Choate lynching (not the only one to happen there) and the 1946 confrontation. The idea that the company didn't know Columbia's history rings false somehow. It seems more like they didn't care. Aldean obviously didn't; he has consistently defended the song and said that calling the video racist is going too far.
But CMT pulled the "Try That" vid out of their rotation after the controversy heated up, and it makes me wonder if somebody there did some Wiki research of their own. It's frighteningly easy to pick up a racist vibe from the video once you know Columbia's racist history; CMT was doing the bare minimum of the right thing by pulling it.
Oh, and to all the Aldean fanfolk screaming about "cancel culture"...the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) would like a word. All they did to get cancelled was say they were ashamed to be from the same state as George Dubya. Nobody I know was defending them when they disappeared from every radio station owned by Clear Channel. So kwitcherbitchin'.
And Now, Back To My Comment...
Remember Aldean's implication that big-time crime didn't happen in small towns? Remember, too, how I called "bullshit" on that? Well, let me tell you a story.
Back in my hometown, there was a bachelor brother and his spinster sister, both middle-aged, who lived together in the same house. This was in the 1980's, and things were still relaxed enough that hardly anybody locked their door unless they were leaving for a while. The brother often came to our house of an evening, toting a case of cheap beer in the front of his overalls (he didn't own a car or truck, though he would gladly help you fix yours, or indeed help you with any odd job you needed) as a contribution to the evening's festivities (usually music played on the front porch). His sister was a science-fiction fan like me, and we traded books and got together with the school librarian for road trips to large cities with book stores. Neither sibling had a job, so I'm guessing one or both of them was on disability, or perhaps a military pension in the brother's case. But if that was the case, they weren't getting much--enough for basic needs and a little beer (and book) money.
One day in the late 80's (I was away at college at the time), while the siblings were taking an afternoon nap, several teens from a neighboring small town (not city kids, mind you) walked right into the house looking for drug money. They killed both of the siblings in their sleep, and got away with just a few dollars...not a hundred, or even twenty. Less than that, and no jewelry or other saleable loot, since those people had none.
According to my mom, the whole town went up like a firecracker, with all kinds of threats if those punks ever showed up in town again. The punks got caught by the county cops, they went to jail, and the only lingering effect of the murder was that now everybody locked their doors, even when they were home.
So, sorry, Jason. Small towns do get their share of heinous crimes. But you know what doesn't help? Vigilante mobs. All you get from those are lynchings.
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