For all the hubbub about Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” what surprised me is what a terrible country song it is: tuneless, witless and mumbled more than sung. Absent ginned-up controversy and MAGA cheerleading, it would fade into obscurity as surely as Aldean’s previous single, “That’s What Tequila Does,” which topped out at No. 77 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Ever heard that one? I didn’t think so. Aldean’s not in the rotation on the Arkansas country oldies station I listen to in the car, which may be a lot of what “Small Town’s” about. Nothing revives a fading career as surely as shooting up a case of Bud Light, “owning the libs” and waving the flag. Yeehaw!
It’s true that I grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, an industrial port city inhabited by successive waves of multiethnic immigrants. It’s also true, however, that I owned several Hank Williams albums in high school, and that one of my first dates with the Arkansas girl who became my wife was to see Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys at a rural high school in Virginia.
It was an incredible musical experience, like hearing the Rolling Stones in a corner bar. All my idea, incidentally. Bluegrass was a little too country for Diane in those days. By Arkansas standards, she was a big-city girl — a graduate student studying history at UVA.
Way back when, my dad used to listen to a Saturday morning radio program called “Make-Believe Ballroom.” After the pop hits, they’d play the top five country and western and rhythm and blues tunes, and those caught my ear. Later, I listened to WWVA-AM from Wheeling, West Virginia, at night, and WNJR-AM from Newark by day — from Hank Williams to B.B. King. It seemed to me then that all of the music with heart and soul came from the rural south.
So I wanted to go there.
Even the most compelling popular music of the era, from the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis to Buddy Holly, was southern in origin. (Never cared for Elvis, though. Sorry.) And a prevailing theme of that music was nostalgia for what the Jerry Lee Lewis tear-jerker called “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” (It’s about a convict awaiting execution.)
Speaking of nostalgia, listen to the Everly Brothers sing “Kentucky” (their home state). It’s far too rustic for any contemporary radio station.
But yes, the superiority of rural to urban life has been a persistent theme of country music since forever. According to NPR’s Amanda Marie Martinez, country songs tend to “place the rural and urban along not only a moral versus immoral binary, but an implicitly racialized one as well. Cities are painted as spaces where crime, sexual promiscuity and personal and financial ruin occur, while the ‘country’ is meanwhile framed as a peaceful space where happiness reigns.”
Yeah, well, so what? As I pointed out here in a different context recently, “mutual suspicion between city and country is literally one of the oldest stories in the world. The fable ‘Mus Urbanus et Mus Rusticus’ (‘The City Mouse and the Country Mouse’) was already 500 years old when Roman poet Horace borrowed it for his ‘Satires’ in 35 B.C. Its originator, the Greek slave Aesop, is thought to have lived in the sixth century B.C.”
And, yes, earlier songs with political overtones have sparked controversy. Owning a live album with Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” on it once got Diane and me scolded by a group of assistant professors we’d invited for dinner — an instructive learning experience. But I agreed with Haggard himself, who thought it was funny.
“White lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all,” Haggard sang.
Come on, professor, lighten up. Besides, Haggard could really sing. The Hillbilly Frank Sinatra, you could call him.
Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” makes a better comparison to Aldean’s song, although it’s mostly about redneck self-reliance: “We can skin a buck, we can run a trot line/And a country boy can survive.” But Hank, too, can sing, and his storytelling lyrics stay in your mind.
Ironically, Aldean comes from Macon, Georgia, a city with among the highest violent crime rates in the U.S. His lyrics are banal, and unlike most good country music, they don’t tell a story: “Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk/Carjack an old lady at a red light ... Yeah, you think you’re tough/Well, try that in a small town.”
Is that even a song? What CMT and others found objectionable is the video featuring stock footage of violent street protests — many evidently filmed in foreign countries. No, the lyrics don’t mention race, but it’s all nevertheless reminiscent of a Ron DeSantis campaign commercial. Dark, foreboding and angry.
American flags and a guy in a cowboy hat with a guitar: a dumb, ugly cliche.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
