How "Country" are Country Artists?
With controversy swirling around Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town", I wanted to figure out how many country artists are really from small towns.
In late May 2023, Jason Aldean released his newest single, “Try That in a Small Town”. It hit number 35 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart during the first week of June but fell off the chart within one week. Though Aldean is quite popular, it was looking to be a forgotten song from an aging star.
That changed dramatically when the song’s video was released in July. It showed Aldean performing in front of the Columbia, Tennessee courthouse interspersed with clips of violence, rioting, and assorted small town imagery. Suddenly, the song became a political flashpoint.
Aldean supporters argued that the song espoused the ethics of God-fearing, small-town living. Critics said the video and lyrics were a tacit endorsement of racial violence because the Columbia, Tennessee courthouse - again, where the video was filmed - was the site of the 1927 lynching of Henry Choate, an 18-year-old African-American man.
This controversy made the song wildly popular. To quote, one YouTube commenter, “I would have never even heard of this song if people hadn't been upset about it”. By the end of July, it had topped the Billboard Hot 100.
As this happened, I heard a few people mention something that caught my eye. Jason Aldean isn’t from a small town. Aldean is from Macon, Georgia. When he was born in 1977, Macon had a population of over 100,000. By no means is that a small town. Country artists often sing about small towns - albeit, usually in a less politically charged manner - but how often are those artists actually from small towns? I decided to find out.
Was I Born in a Small Town?
In a 2022 episode of the Full Send podcast, Luke Bryan took aim at phonies in country music:
Here’s what I can unequivocally say without a shadow of a doubt. If you sing about hunting and fishing and drinking and trucks and shit, and I get you on my farm, in one minute I can tell if you’re a poser or if you’re not legit.
Authenticity is an important concept in many genres. Getting called a poser in the hip-hop or punk community, for example, can be a serious insult. Country is the same way. Despite what you think of Luke Bryan’s music, he is indeed a small-town boy. Leesburg, Georgia had a population of about 1,000 people when he was born in 1976.
To understand if country music was filled with more Jason Aldeans or Luke Bryans, I needed to get a list of country artists, find out when they were born, find out where they were born, and then find the population at that time and in that place.
I decided to start with Wikipedia’s “List of country music performers” page. Of course, this doesn’t list every person to ever sing a country song, but it has almost 2,100 notable artists born between 1868 and 2008. I thought that was pretty good.
I then wrote a script to look up each artist’s hometown and birth date on their Wikipedia page. After removing all bands, along with artists born outside the United States, I was left with 1,209 acts, still a sizable sample. As I grabbed the populations of the place each artist was born, one question loomed: What is a small town?
The answer to this short question has a long, complex history. I’ll spare you the details, but for a long time the Census defined small towns, or rural places, as those with fewer than 2,500 people. During the 2020 Census, they shifted the threshold up to 5,000 people. So, I figured we could run with those two figures.
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