“Try That In A Small Town” was a huge hit for Jason Aldean, but it brought with it a whole boatload of controversy.
While the song itself didn’t attract much notice outside of the singer’s fanbase, the video that came out two months later garnered a lot of attention, including from those well outside the country music life group.
In what “CBS Mornings” says was a first, Aldean spoke with them about the song, the video and the controversy surrounding both.
On the subject of racism in the video, Aldean responded,
“There was people of all color doing stuff in the video, that’s what I don’t understand. You know, there was white people in there, there was black people…I mean, this video did not shine light on one specific group and say, ‘that’s the problem’…and anybody that saw that in the video, then, you weren’t looking hard enough in the video, is all I can tell you.”
On whether he thought the song would be a problem for some people:
“On the second verse it says…’got a gun that my granddad gave me/they say one day they’re gonna round up’…that I thought was gonna be the biggest issue with the song, was that it said ‘gun’…and that would tend to get people talking sometimes about that…I didn’t expect it to get the kind of heat that it got. And I think that was more probably because of the video moreso than the actual song.”
On the controversial location for the video shoot (the Murray Co. Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a 1927 lynching):
“For anybody that thinks that we picked that building specifically for that reason, because there was a lynching there, whatever…I also don’t go back 100 years and check on the history of a place before we go shoot it either…it’s also the place I go get my car tags every year. It’s my county that I live in.” He did add that, knowing what he knows now, he wouldn’t have shot the video there. “Honestly, if you’re in the South, you can probably go to any small-town courthouse, you’re gonna be hard-pressed to find one that hasn’t had some sort of racial issue over the years at some point, I mean, that’s just a fact.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hmK1l__ZEE
Source: TasteofCountry
