During an appearance on Bill Maher's "Club Random" podcast, Trace Adkins gave his opinion about the controversies in recent years surrounding Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen.
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Adkins' defense of Aldean considered only one of the multiple criticisms of "Try That in a Small Town"— the choice to shoot its music video at Tennessee's Maury County Courthouse, a commonly-used filming location and the site of the 1927 lynching of a Black man named Henry Choate.
"He had no idea," Adkins said after Maher suggested that Aldean likely didn't know the courthouse's history. "The grievance junkies turn on somebody and they try to cancel them, and all it's going to do, he's going to sell more records than he ever has and it's going to make him bigger than he's ever been... He had no idea, man. Do you know how many music videos I've done that I've called up the director and went, 'Hey, man, now what about this location where we're shooting this thing?' And if I did do that, it's only because I didn't know where I was going. [Aldean] had no idea. That director picked that location because it had the look they wanted. It was just a small-town courthouse, that's all it was. And it happened to be close."
In a Nov. 2023 chat with CBS, Aldean said that he didn't know the courthouse's history and conceded that if he could do it over again, he would suggest a different filming location.
"Knowing what I know now, probably not," he said . "But it's also— I'm not going to go back 100 years and check on the history of this building because, honestly, if you're in the South, you could probably go to any small-town courthouse, you're going to be hard-pressed to find one that hasn't had some racial issue over the years at some point. That's just a fact. For anybody that thinks that we picked that building specifically for that reason, because there was a lynching there, whatever."
Maher and Adkins' conversation briefly turned to Wallen, the fallout he faced in 2021 after he was filmed using a racial slur and the career highs he's experienced since then.
"He sold out two nights in a row, 55,000-plus tickets each night," Adkins said. "God... cancel me."
Maher asked Adkins if he thought of either Aldean or Wallen as racist.
"I've been around both of those guys. They're good guys," Adkins replied. "There's no... they're not racist."
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