Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” video, which features clips of burning U.S. flags and protestors confronting police, was pulled by the Country Music Television channel on Tuesday after the country singer was blasted on Twitter for the song’s inflammatory lyrics and for where it was filmed.
In the clip, Aldean performs the song in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, a site of a notorious lynching of a Black man nearly 100 years ago.
The song, which was released in May, has already been interpreted by many as an ode to the notorious “sundown towns” of the past thanks to lyrics like, “Try that in a small town, see how far ya make it down the road … you cross that line it won’t take long for you to find out/recommend you don’t.”
Aldean shared a lengthy statement to Twitter on Tuesday, insisting that “Try That in a Small Town” is a not “a pro-lynching song.”
He wrote, “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage – and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music – this one goes too far.”
As Ashton Pittman, a news editor for The Mississippi Free Press noted on Twitter, “Jason Aldean shot this at the site where a white lynch mob strung Henry Choate up at the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., after dragging his body through the streets with a car in 1927. That’s where Aldean chose to sing about murdering people who don’t respect police.”
“Henry Choate was just 18. Reports suggest he was beaten horrifically before white supremacists murdered him in an act of terror. In Jason Aldean’s video, an American flag hangs where Henry was murdered as Aldean sings ‘I recommend you don’t try that in a small town.’ Sickening,” a Twitter user named Nate Morris tweeted.
“This song is an ode to a sundown town, suggesting people be beaten or shot for expressing free speech. It also insinuates that guns are being confiscated, the penalty for which is apparently death. Aldean was on stage when 60 of his fans were shot to death and 400+ were wounded,” Shannon Watts, founder of the anti-NRA group Moms Demand Action, tweeted, referring to the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival where Aldean was performing.
Aldean added that the song, which was written by Kelley Lovelace, Kurt Allison, Neil Thrasher & Tully Kennedy, “refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief… I know that a lot of us in this Country don’t agree on how we get back to a sense of normalcy where we go at least a day without a headline that keeps us up at night. But the desire for it to – that’s what this song is about.”
