I know this is going to make me seem a million years old. Bring me my afghan and my tea and set me in a rocking chair, I guess. But if Jason Aldean fans had ever heard “A Country Boy Can Survive,” how could they have any interest in listening to “Try That in a Small Town” more than once? In a world where both songs exist and you can choose which one to get your “Damn, the cities are messed up and us country folks are going to have to be the moral center of America” fix to, how could it ever be “Try That in a Small Town”?
And yeah, I know that Nashville runs on singers and songwriters often being different people. The problem isn’t that Jason Aldean sings a bad song about being from a small town written by other people when he himself is not from a small town. It’s that a series of choices were made to record this song and then to release that music video, and all of those choices were weird and bad and Jason Aldean is rightly having to defend those choices — but Jason Aldean isn’t invested enough in the creative process he sits at the center of to even understand what the problem is.
Aldean released a statement about the controversy surrounding his song and video. It starts:
In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. 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.
Y’all, bless him. Within minutes of this statement going live on Twitter, folks on TikTok had already hunted down where all the video clips came from — and a lot of this “news footage” is actually stock footage you can get for free or cheap. And the shot of the woman flipping off a cop? That’s from a German May Day celebration, not a protest in the U.S.
As for there not being “a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it,” come on! Think of it this way. Let’s say we’re in a park in Brentwood and there are two pavilions with groups having cookouts. One group is made up of mostly Black people, and one group is made up of mostly white people. All the vehicles in the parking lot look similar. Everyone’s dressed in jeans and T-shirts. You notice both groups start their meal with a prayer. Jason Aldean says, “I’m going to go grab some of those good ol' boys.” What pavilion is he headed toward? The fact that we all know where he’s headed when he references "good ol' boys" means there are lyrics in the song that point to race.
I genuinely can’t decide which is funnier: the fact that he knows what he’s saying is bullshit, but it’s good enough for his fans, so whatever; or the fact that he doesn’t know and yet his label and his management team and the people who actually made the music video are just letting him go out and be wrong with his whole chest. Someone, somewhere, thinks that this will blow over and all these dummies will go on being fine with Jason Aldean. It’s just not clear if Aldean himself is one of the dummies or not. But I suspect he is.
This dumbass who doesn’t actually know what his song is about or what the contents of his music video are is being left to twist in the wind by all the people surrounding him who do get it, and he’s not even smart enough to be pissed at them for putting him in this position. They may "take care of their own in a small town," as the song says, but Aldean’s own are not taking care of him. Guess that’s what he gets for living in a city?
As Aldean notes, the song came out in May and no one gave a shit then. But the music video came out last week. The music video that prominently features Aldean in front of the Maury County Courthouse down in Columbia, singing: “Try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road / Around here we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won’t take long for you to find out.” This is filmed in front of the place where Henry Choate was lynched on Armistice Day in 1927. Aldean’s team had an American flag above the banister Choate was tied to. Aldean stood in front of the doorway where Choate’s body hanged.
Choate was, depending on which report you read, 17, 18 or 19 years old. He was accused of attacking a white girl, Sarah Harlan, who could not positively identify him as her attacker after bloodhounds tracked him down to his grandfather’s house. Henry only had two grandfathers — Tyler Choate, who was living in Columbia, so we know it wasn’t his house Henry ran to, and Henry Harlan, who young Henry was named for. Harlan. Same last name as Sarah. In fact, both Harlan families came out of Kentucky and ended up in the exact same place in rural Maury County, living on the same stretch of road. These Harlans, who also sometimes had the last name Joyce, were mixed race, meaning that not only were Sarah and Henry neighbors — her family had enslaved his family, and they were likely family. She knew him her whole life. If he had attacked her, she would have known it was him. Her mother begged the mob to let the court figure out if he was the actual attacker, but they broke into the Maury County jail (I don’t know if it’s irony or a contributing factor to the lynching, but Henry’s father had escaped from that very jail in 1903), hit him with a sledgehammer, tied him to a car bumper, and dragged him to the courthouse. It’s unclear if he was dead before he dropped from the balcony and hanged in the doorway. Sarah married and moved up to Nashville, by my house. She went to City Road United Methodist Church, where I go to church when I bother to go to church. She died shortly after I was born. One of Henry’s nieces just died in 2019. That is how recent this was, how close this is.
A few years later, 17-, 18-, 19- or 20-year-old Cordie Cheek was lynched after a grand jury failed to indict him for the rape of a 12-year-old white girl, citing a lack of evidence. (Rumor had it that her brother paid her a dollar to accuse Cheek after the brother and Cheek had a fight.) Members of the mob came to Nashville and kidnapped him out of a relative’s house near Fisk. They hanged him from a cedar tree out southeast of town after castrating him. Cheek made it about five miles out of the small town Aldean celebrates in his video before Cheek found out what happens when you “cross a line” or when white people decide you crossed a line. Or when good ol' boys don’t care that it most likely wasn’t you who crossed that line, but they’re blaming you anyway. His sister, Claudia, was the family cook of Elizabeth Queener, a white woman who has been trying to get a memorial set up for the victims of racist violence in Maury County. I found five men. She’s documented almost 30.
In 1946, in the wake of the Columbia Riots, white Columbians tried to kidnap Thurgood Marshall, one of the NAACP lawyers who defended the Black people the white people rioted against. His fellow defense lawyers, Z. Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver, followed the car that had Marshall and likely saved his life. Until the trial was moved to Lewisburg, those men had to defend the victims of the riot (it was a strange, racist thing where the people who rampaged and destroyed businesses and looted went free and the people trying to defend themselves all got arrested) in the courthouse in Aldean’s video.
I keep thinking about how Aldean’s explanation of this is basically that people are going too far with their interpretations. But like, there’s no room for going too far. He stood in that spot. He sang those lyrics. He sang about how, in a small town, good ol' boys handle it if you’ve crossed a line, in a small town where good ol' boys handled lynching Black men — or in the cases of Cheek and Choate, teenage boys — who they decided had crossed a line. He stood in front of the spot where Choate was hanged. If I’ve gone “too far” in seeing that, where was I supposed to place my eyes? The building is right there, behind him. And if the building doesn’t matter, if it’s just a backdrop with no meaning, then why did Aldean and a whole crew of people go down there to film in front of that building? Why not stand in a field? Or in front of a green screen? What, in this video for a song about vigilante justice, is indicating to me as a viewer that I should disregard the place Jason Aldean is standing in front of?
I guess it seems unfair to Aldean because he didn’t know that Henry Choate was lynched there. But my God, once you find out, how do you not apologize? I mean, Henry still has family here. Can you imagine what they’re making of that video? It’s a terrible tragedy that he was killed there. It’s an obscenity to see one of the biggest country stars around celebrating vigilantism on that spot.
Jason Aldean should apologize. Not to any of us. Lord knows I don’t give a shit if he’s sorry. But he owes it to Henry’s family. Unless he’s not sorry, in which case ... well, if him wearing blackface didn’t do it, now you know how he feels about Black people.
