Jason Aldean Is An Affront To Country Music

Jason Aldean, Candace Owens and Brittany Aldean speaking with attendees at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore

BY JAMES CONRAD

In July 2023, a video was released to promote the song “Try That In A Small Town,” written by Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison, and recorded by American country music singer Jason Aldean. In the video, Jason Aldean, known for his explicit right-wing values, is seen singing lines like “They say one day they’re gonna round up/Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck/Try that in a small town/See how far ya make it down the road” in front of the same Columbia, Tennessee courthouse that was the scene of the lynching of black teenager Henry Choate in 1927 and of race riots just less than 20 years later.

Almost immediately, sensible left-leaning listeners clued into the blatant racist dog-whistles in the lyrics and video. Besides the obvious use of the site of racist violence as a location for the shoot and the threat “see how far you make it down the road” evoking the age when black people were advised to not be seen in certain towns after dark, it’s common knowledge that a lot of right-leaning small-town dwellers characterize cities as crawling with the very objects of their prejudice.

For example, an account mentions that in the 1950s, the town of Orange, Connecticut was specifically zoned to exclude black people, with one particularly bigoted citizen declaring, “We don’t want Orange
to turn into a red light district like New Haven!”

I also remember, as a teenager playing first-chair tuba in the All-Regional Band in the 1990s, overhearing one of my fellow musicians characterizing my hometown of New Haven as “Alien Africa.”

Inevitably, in the aftermath of the video’s release, the justified backlash was loud and strident. In the midst of that, it was made clear that Jason Aldean, who didn’t write the song, was born in Macon, Georgia, a city containing a little over 150,000 people – definitely not a small town. Although Jason Aldean’s fans claim that the 11.6 million streams of the horseshit abomination of a song and the 18 million views of its video demonstrate that the so-called “silent majority” is alive and well in the United States, dividing those numbers by the US population – roughly 330 million – yields a tiny percentage, even if all those people clicking on the link were, in fact, hard-core Trump supporters.

While Jason Aldean and his fans swear up and down that he is not racist, it doesn’t help their case that people remembered Aldean sporting blackface for Halloween in 2015.

All things considered, Jason Aldean is the latest high-profile exponent in the systematic pollution and desecration of country music by the right-wingers who have infiltrated the genre since Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign. Believe it or not, many classic country songs had lyrical themes that could be characterized as left-leaning.

For example, the 1967 recording “Skip A Rope,” written by Jack Moran and Glenn Douglas Tubb and sung by Henson Cargill, rebukes parents for teaching their children to be prejudiced, thereby straying from true Christian values – “Now what was that they said about a Golden Rule?/Never mind the rules just play to win./And hate your neighbor for the shade of his skin.”

Sympathy for the plight of worker was also a long-standing lyrical theme of many classic country songs such as “16 Tons” performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Take This Job and Shove It” by David Allen Coe and “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton, which adds a feminist perspective to the discussion.

In 1952, Hank Thompson was the first to perform the country standard “Wild Side of Life.” Written by Arlie Carter and William Warren, the lyrics scold an unfaithful woman. A few short months later, Kitty Wells sang “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” – lyrics written by J.D. Miller calling out “married men [who] think they’re still single” and set to the same tune.

Another example is Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe,” a subtle pro-choice anthem. The song is from the point-of-view of a young woman from Mississippi whose family gossips over the suicide of the titular local boy over dinner, unaware that she herself was Billie Joe’s girlfriend. There are also faint hints that the narrator fell pregnant by Billie Joe and they both decided to induce an abortion. Perhaps what she and Billie Joe were seen throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge was their unborn child.

On a more light-hearted note, “Harper Valley P.T.A,” sung by Jeanie C. Riley, depicts a liberated widow who wears miniskirts and likes to party responding to criticism that she is an unfit mother by showing up at a PTA meeting and exposing the sordid behavior of its members – “‘Mr. Baker can you tell us why/Your secretary had to leave this town?/And shouldn’t widow Jones be told to keep/Her window shades all pulled completely down?/Well, Mr. Harper couldn’t be here/’Cause he stayed too long at Kelly’s Bar again/And if you smell Shirley Thompson’s breath
You’ll find she’s had a little nip of gin/And then you have the nerve to tell me/You think that as the mother I’m not fit/Well, this is just a little Peyton Place/And you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.'”

In 1975, Loretta Lynn released the song “The Pill,” in which a monogamous woman relishes that she and her husband can for once enjoy their sex life without the consequence of expecting a child through it. Not surprisingly, the song’s suggestive double entendres – “This incubator is overused/Because you’ve kept it filled” – and candid description of birth control earned it bans from several radio stations. However, a ripple effect of the controversy was that Loretta Lynn earned her highest placing on the mainstream pop charts.

Needless to say, mainstream country music simply ain’t what it used to be, and that’s a damn shame.

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