It feels like yesterday when Jason Aldean’s song “Try That In A Small Town” tore the country right in half.
The song, which calls out big city lawlessness, was released back in May, and didn’t really receive much attention until Jason dropped a music video featuring scenes of rioting and looting along with video of Jason performing in front of the Maury County courthouse in his hometown of Columbia, Tennessee.
After releasing the music video, many on the left began criticizing the song as “racist” and pointing out that the courthouse featured in the video was the site of a public lynching in 1927.
Everyone from Maren Morris to Sheryl Crow and Sierra Ferrell jumped in to call out Aldean, and CMT pulled the music video from its rotation during the one hour a day that CMT apparently still shows music videos at 3 AM in between reruns of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and Last Man Standing.
Many others, including presidential candidates like former President Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, along with artists like Travis Tritt, Cody Johnson and Brantley Gilbert, and even George Jones’ wife Nancy, defended Jason Aldean and the song from accusations that it had anything to do with race.
The song took off amid the controversy, rocketing to the top of the iTunes chart and the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart, despite failing to gain any real traction before the video was released.
But despite its success, the question remains…
Does the song deserve to be recognized by major awards shows like the Grammys?
Shooter Jennings, the country singer/songwriter and son of Waylon Jennings, doesn’t believe so.
TMZ met up with Jennings at the Los Angeles Airport, where they asked him about Aldean’s song for whatever reason.
When asked whether “Try That In a Small Town” should be considered for a Grammy, Shooter explained why he doesn’t think it should – and it has nothing to do with politics:
“I don’t think they should. I’ll tell you why, it’s not like it’s like bad and should be cancelled, I think it was a crappy song to begin with.
It was. It’s not good.
It was like something that was really catchy, it was just divisive and they went for it. So to me, I don’t think that’s a good enough song to be considered.”
He also added that the insane streaming numbers the song put up weren’t very accurate, because it was just people who were trying to hear what all the fuss was about.
“Right now with the streams, when stuff like blows up and there’s all this politics and the internet all mixed into it, it’s not real numbers to me.”
But he says it all just boils down to it not being a very good song:
“It’s not a very good song. Me and all my friends are like, this is a ridiculous conversation because it’s poorly written, it’s not very interesting, it’s not even really that country.
So no offense to him but like, I think it’s a moot point.”
Safe to say that Shooter isn’t expecting to see Aldean up for a Grammy with this one:
“I’d be very surprised if it was nominated.”
