CMA Fest is officially back.
After being canceled due to COVID the past two years, Nashville’s biggest country music festival is finally set to make its return a week from now, kicking off four days of concerts all over the city on June 9.
But one thing that won’t be returning is the Confederate flag.
According to CMA Fest’s website, the festival is banning “Confederate flag imagery of every kind.” And in a statement to The Tennessean, CMA Fest organizers felt it was important to explicitly ban the flag for the first time this year:
“This year’s CMA Fest is our first major fan-facing event in nearly three years. We have always had policies in place that protect the safety of our fans and ban discrimination, but we felt it was important to further refine our language to explicitly outline what will and will not be tolerated.
In line with our first CMA Fest lineup announcement in early April, our event policy was published on our website, which states any behavior that causes one of our attendees to fear for their personal safety will not be tolerated, and that is inclusive of any displays of the Confederate flag.”
The decision comes at the first CMA Festival held since the fierce debate over the Confederate flag during the summer of 2020, when NASCAR also announced that they would ban the Confederate flag from their events, and on the heels of several other major festivals, including last month’s Stagecoach Festival in California, also issuing bans on the Confederate flag.
And Maren Morris, who had previously called for the flag to be banned from all festivals, said during last year’s Country Radio Seminar:
“Can we just agree, at these country music festivals, I see the Confederate flags in the parking lots, I don’t want to play those festivals anymore. If you were a black person would you ever feel safe going to a show with those flying in the parking lot? No.
I feel like the most powerful thing as artists in our position right now is to make those demands of large organizations, festivals, promoters, whatnot. That’s one of the things we can do is say ‘No, I’m not doing this. Get rid of them.’”
During the same conversation, Stagecoach headliner Luke Combs spoke on, and again apologized for, his previous use of the Confederate flag in a 2015 music video:
“There is no excuse for those images. I’m not trying to say, ‘This is why they were there and it’s OK that they were there.’ It’s not OK. As a younger man, that was an image I associated to mean something else.
As I’ve grown in my time as an artist, and as the world has changed drastically in the last five to seven years, I am now aware how painful that image can be...I would never want to be associated with something that brings so much hurt to someone else.
There is no excuse for those images. I’m not trying to say, ‘This is why they were there and it’s OK that they were there.’ It’s not OK. As a younger man, that was an image I associated to mean something else.
As I’ve grown in my time as an artist, and as the world has changed drastically in the last five to seven years, I am now aware how painful that image can be...I would never want to be associated with something that brings so much hurt to someone else.”
CMA Fest kicks off next Thursday, June 9 and runs through Sunday with performances at multiple stages all over Nashville.
