Jason Aldean and divided country music

Country singer Jason Aldean performs on stage (Picture: Jana Beamer on Flickr)

A mob of 350 white people lynched the battered body of black teenager Henry Choate in November 1927 at the red, white and blue covered Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee.

Nearly a century later, country singer Jason Aldean chose the courthouse to film the video for his recent song, “Try That in a Small Town”. It features lyrics on vigilantism and mob violence inter-cut with footage of Black Lives Matter protests. 

Any complaint was met with right wingers claiming the song was cancelled as it rose through the charts. It stands in a long tradition in country music but all traditions are invented. So something as “traditional” as bluegrass was invented in Nashville in 1940s as a way of competing with new electronic instruments by playing old songs faster. 

Country music is the music of people looking back to where they think they came from. As Dolly Parton put it, “In the good old days, when times were bad”. This is what provided a mass radio audience in the 1930s for the comforts of the Carter Family and the radicalism of Woody Guthrie.

Conservatives saw potential. Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic car maker, promoted “hillbilly music” as an alternative to jazz, which was perceived to be less moral and less white.

Up to a point. The first star, Jimmie Rodgers, learned to sing working on the railroad with black workers singing the blues. He sang about TB, and of train crashes and floods, drink and drugs, and sex.

Jimmie Davis was a singer of innuendo-ridden ballards but was elected governor of Louisiana on the back of “You Bring Me Sunshine”. In 1960 he did his best to stop the state’s desegregation. But the “tradition” that country music is inherently right wing was also invented.

It was rooted in a conscious agenda of the Nixon-era that tried to turn politics into a battle over culture. It was a calculated attempt at inventing a “white working class” and pitting it against the radical movements that had emerged in the 1960s.

Nixon made overtures to country stars, and they reciprocated. The Country Music Association made, Thank You Mr. President. Nixon quotes were interwoven with homages to the hard-working, love-rich poor folk, patriotic fighting men.

Making country eternally conservative narrowed the music’s scope. It was rich men in cowboy hats singing about being poor.

The intermingling and theft of genres were ignored. Harry McClintock who wrote “Big Rock Candy Mountain” for the Industrial Workers of the World was forgotten, and the communist Woody Guthrie and others were lumped into the vague but decidedly separate category of “folk music.” To be fair this suited a Stalinist view on the left of proper purist “art” as opposed to the nasty commercial stuff.

Merle Haggard captured the spirit singing, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. Cause we like living right, and being free.” 

But life, like capitalism is full of contradictions. So Haggard smoked plenty. Coal miner’s daughter Loretta Lynn campaigned for the Bush presidents, but sang in praise of birth control. Johnny Cash’s radicalism was as real as his faith. There is music that takes experience, wraps it safely and turns it into a commodity. 

Then there’s music that, consciously or not, grapples with the wounded self, hoping that there’s a chance to make life a bit more whole. It’s not uncommon for an uneven and combined consciousness, to coin a phrase, to weave through the same artist’s work and sometimes in the same song.

For every Sweet Home Alabama there is Old Town Road by Lil Nas X. For every Haggard there is Steve “I’m a borderline Marxist” Earle. 

And for Jason Aldean there is Iris DeMent. Try, Goin’ Down To Sing In Texas where she sings “How many more people of colour are we gonna let be gunned down by police/ How many more perpetrators are we gonna sit back and watch walk free/ You took a knee to stand up for your rights/ I want you to know that I’m right there by your side”.