Jason Aldean defends contentious song ‘Try That in a Small Town’: It’s ‘common sense’

nypost.com:

doubled down on his defense of the controversial song “Try That in a Small Town” after it was branded pro-lynching and racist.

Aldean, 46, claimed while appearing on the “Coop’s Rockin’ Country Saturday Night” podcast that he was “not sayin’ anything that’s not true.“If you’ve got common sense, you can look at the video and see, I’m not sayin’ anything that’s not true,” the singer added. “In the video, I’m showin’ you what happened — I didn’t do it, I didn’t create it — it just happened and I saw it, and I’m not cool with it.” The Post reached out to Aldean for comment.

Aldean’s song, which was originally released in May and went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, caused massive backlash online after some listeners claimed the singer was promoting violence. “We put the song out in, I think it was May or something — and the biggest issue, I think, people had when we released the song was that it mentioned ‘having a gun that my grandfather gave me,’” Aldean explained on the podcast. “I mentioned a gun, that’s a no-no right now, and I just remember thinking, ‘Man, you guys haven’t even seen the video yet.’”Controversy around Aldean’s tune only grew in July after the singer released a video for the song, which showed him and his band outside the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where the 1946 Columbia race riot began and almost led to the lynching of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve in that role.Columbia was also the site of the 1927 lynching of 18-year-old Henry Choate, who was accused of assaulting a white 16-year-old girl despite her inability to identify Choate as her attacker.