Bob Neal

Among the many gifts America has given the world are two forms of music, jazz and country.

Jazz has been a leader in innovation and inclusion, country music not so much.

Even so, I’ve always liked country better.

Through the sweep of cultural history, jazz has come to be thought of as Black music, country as white. But Black and white Americans alike are deep in the roots of each. Jazz and its fans have celebrated that history; country music and its fans have tried to reverse it, or just ignore it.

Now, country is at another crossroad. It can point its art and its fans forward or backward.

The focus of country’s latest dustup is the song “Try That in a Small Town,” released in May by Jason Aldean, a beacon to hard-rightists who want country to push their political agenda.

More correctly, the flap is over the video, released on July 14. The centerpiece of the video is the Maury County courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where in 1946 a Black teenager was killed with a sledgehammer and his body hung from the courthouse with a confederate flag.

When liberal commentators, notably in The Washington Post, jumped all over Aldean’s video, Country Music Television quickly pulled it. His publicity company also dropped him, after having shepherded him through earlier flareups such as refusing to wear a mask at a show in New York during peak COVID and dressing his young children in T-shirts that read “Hidin’ from Biden.” He has worn blackface in public and confederate flag T-shirts on stage.

Aldean has responded, rightly, that the lyrics don’t mention race. But the pugnacious Aldean surely recognizes dog whistles. The lyrics suggest a reckoning near at hand pitting small-towners with guns against an unspecified “you” (or “ya” in some verses). Here’s part of the lyrics:

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk; carjack an old lady at a red light;

Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store; ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like.

Ya think you’re tough, well, try that in a small town.

You cross that line, it won’t take long for you to find out. I recommend you don’t

Try that in a small town full of good ol’ boys, raised up right.

If you’re looking for a fight, try that in a small town.

Variety critic Chris Willman wrote that the song is “close to being the most cynical song ever written about the implicit moral superiority of having a limited number of neighbors.”

If Aldean had any sensitivity, he mightn’t have chosen Maury County for the video. At least 20 Black men and boys were lynched, disappeared or murdered by white mobs there, research by historian Elizabeth Queener shows. Maury abuts Giles County, where the Ku Klux Klan began.

The song is factually suspect for allusions to urban crime. Gun-murder rates in rural areas surpass those in cities, according to the Center for American Progress. The top two counties in gun homicides per capita are Phillips County, Arkansas, at 55 per 100,000 people, and Lowndes County, Alabama, at 48.

Of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita, 13 were rural (2016-20). The overall rate was 40% higher in rural counties.

A bit of history. When the “Grand Ole Opry” began in 1927, one of its stars was DeFord Bailey, a Black man reputed to be a genius on the harmonica. About that time, Leslie Riddle was taking the Carter family to Black churches in the mountains of Upper East Tennessee to “collect” old-timey songs for the Carters and others to perform on the Opry stage. Riddle was Black.

After that, the Opry was lily white for 40 years until Charley Pride came along in the 1960s. Country fans finally took to his songs, but his image seemed to rely on a “happy Negro” persona. Example, “Kiss an Angel Good Morning.”

To be fair, Black artists are starting to make it in country music, though some, such as Mickey Guyton, have said that the road seems harder to walk for Blacks. Darius Rucker, formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish, is a big-time star.

Rissi Palmer appeared on May 5 at the Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield. Rhiannon Giddens and Don Flemons played there several times as the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Giddens as a solo. I’ve never missed a Giddens show there. If you saw Ken Burns’s “Country Music,” you saw her speak often and eloquently about Black musicians and country music.

The furor over “Try That” may be more useful as a symbol of country music’s penchant for looking backward than for its systematic exclusion of Black performers for nearly half a century.

Country outlasted the “Outlaws” era of the ‘70s by tossing an olive branch to the outlaws (Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, etc.). We’ll see if it outlasts the backlash era of Jason Aldean. 

Bob Neal has lived in the largest city in each of two nations but chooses to live in rural Maine. He read that Aldean, who lionizes small-town life, grew up in Macon, Georgia, a city of 157,345. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.