Jason Aldean brings ‘small town’ celebration and ‘cancel this’ attitude to sold-out show in Wheatland

Maddie Banta bounced up and down with visible excitement at her first-ever concert on Thursday night.

Banta is 14, a Mesa Verde High School freshman and a Jason Aldean fan. She couldn’t stand still outside the sold-out Toyota Amphitheatre near Wheatland as she waited for the country music star to grace the stage.

“What’s the one I like?” she asked her mom, Carisa Canada, of Citrus Heights, as she tried to recall her favorite Aldean tunes.

“‘Try That in a Small Town,’ I think,” her mom told her.

Banta grew up listening to Aldean, Dirks Bentley, Kane Brown and Carrie Underwood, thanks to her mom repeatedly playing their albums.

Canada wore one of the evening’s most popular pieces of $40 merchandise: a gray T-shirt with a middle finger superimposed over a weathered American flag, the words “CANCEL THIS” forming an arc around the gesture.

“Her generation,” Canada said, pointing at her daughter between drags of a cigarette, “is trying to cancel him. But I love that he speaks his mind.”

Aldean, 46, is a two-time Country Music Award recipient whose career took off in 2005 with the hit single “Hicktown,” but who launched into the stratosphere with the RIAA-certified quadruple platinum album “My Kinda Party” in 2010. Aldean has reached mainstream country fame in the years since, with a net worth that now hovers somewhere over $43 million.

He’s also become a mascot for the the right-wing conservative Christian culture wars, and not just as a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, with whom he and his wife spent New Year’s Eve in 2022.

In May, Aldean’s song — the one Banta was particularly excited to hear live — drew enormous criticism and accusations of racism.

Written by four people (not Jason Aldean), “Try That in a Small Town” debuted as an anti-city country anthem about “good ol’ boys” who protect their neighbors from criminals and outsiders.

“Well, try that in a small town,” Aldean croons in the song. “See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won’t take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don’t / Try that in a small town.”

Controversy over the video

Critics of Aldean called it a glorified pro-lynching racist dog-whistle. Their proof, they said, lies not just in the lyrics, but the location he chose for the music video: the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where the Columbia Race Riot began in 1946. It also included footage meant to portray Black Lives Matter protests from 2020. All combined, it was enough for the CMT channel to stop playing the video, which was later edited to remove footage from the protests.

“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests,” Aldean wrote on Instagram in response to the pushback.

“These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it — and there isn’t a single clip that isn’t real news footage — and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music — this one goes too far.” (One TikTok user discredited this statement after she discovered the footage in the video was not from news clips of protests; some clips were from stock footage, another from a rally in Germany).

Controversy aside — or maybe because of it — the song topped the charts in a summer full of culture war disputes over a trans influencer shilling Bud Light, a feminist “Barbie” mega-hit at the movies and drag nuns at a baseball game. Aldean’s wife, Brittany, entered the fray when she posted a caption on Instagram, thanking her “parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase.” The post elicited feedback from fellow country artists, such as Maren Morris, who called her a “scumbag human.”

Even months after its release, the music video currently boasts 37 million views on YouTube, and last week, Aldean’s song sat comfortably at No. 10 on the Billboard Country Top 20 music chart.

It’s no surprise, then, that Aldean was greeted by 18,500 adoring fans at the Yuba County amphitheater — a timely event at a perfect venue for Red California, with Wheatland — population 3,787 — serving as a convenient gateway between the liberal Capitol and the red, rural North State.

Many in attendance wore flowy dresses, cowboy boots, and flannel button-downs. Many others wore shirts and hats with such slogans as “Let’s Go Brandon,” “F--- Joe Biden,” “If This (American) Flag Offends You, I’ll Help You Pack” and “Just a Regular Mom Trying Not To Raise Liberals.” Concertgoers still maintained that they think the hubbub over the song was all just a little too political.

‘He stands up for our freedoms’

Among those concertgoers were Neimiah DeLozier and Breann Miller, who both said they identify with the country firebrand’s message about how small town communities care for one another.

“I lived in Brownsville for 17 years,” said Miller, referring to the tiny town of 1,100 tucked between Highways 70 and 49. She now works for the county welfare office in Marysville.

“I stayed home for all the (nearby wildfires) and I can tell you one thing,” she said. “Our neighbors, we looked out for each other. We fed each other’s animals. If looters came, which they did, we looked out for each other’s property. I believe there’s more of the camaraderie factor in small towns, where you know your neighbor, and that’s what he’s singing about.”

They both said their politics are on the “Republican side of things” but wish things weren’t “so political.”

DeLozier lives in the Oroville area.

“On our dollar bill, it says, “In God We Trust,” and we got so far away from that,” said he said.

And Aldean, he said, serves as spokesman for the return to those values.

“He stands up for our freedoms ... he got an unfair response (to the song),” he said. DeLozier then proudly displayed forearm tattoos that include the “We the people” portion of the U.S. Constitution, an eagle, and “In God We Trust.”

“The response (to the song) was too political. He never mentioned race. He was just saying that what happened in those big cities, well, it doesn’t fly in small towns.”

Aldean opened the show with “Tough Crowd,” also released in May. Not “tough” as in disapproving — at least not in Wheatland, geographically a mere 35 miles from Sacramento, but spiritually about a million.

Rather “tough” by Aldean’s lyrical standards: “country-ass, beer-drinkin’, hell-raisin’ go-all-nighters” and “dirt-turnin’, diesel-burnin’, hard-workin’ nine-to-fivers.”

Aldean will be in Mountain View next Thursday (Sept. 28) for the next leg of his “Highway Desperado Tour.” His final two California shows will take place in Irvine and San Bernardino.