10 Songs About Living in a Small Town (That Aren't Racist)

Jason Aldean’s latest single, “Try That in a Small Town,” caused a huge stir online last week after he released a music video for the song. The video, his accusers say, turns the song's dog-whistling message into a megaphone PSA. The New York Times called the controversy a "culture war" dividing listeners.

The song title raises many questions. First of all, which small town? The country singer hails from Macon, Georgia, the state’s fourth largest city, so it’s not immediately clear which community he’s referring to and how he came to be familiar with their attitudes. The more loaded question, however, is, “Try what?”

If you’re going by the song alone, you could make the charitable assumption that Aldean is simply referring to crime. Crime, of course, does happen in small towns, but who can blame Suburban Cowboy for not knowing that?

Unfortunately, the music video makes quick work of clarifying his intent, at one point displaying footage of the 2020 Black Lives Matters demonstrations projected outside of a Tennessee courthouse where a lynching occurred in the 1920s. This location choice is, at best, a dangerously careless mistake. The video has since been edited, but Aldean’s denials of wrongdoing haven’t helped his case.

While American small towns do tend to lean conservative, they don’t fit as neatly into Aldean’s worldview as he’d like. Songs like “Try That in a Small Town” may work for his personal brand, but it’s hardly a complete picture. Here are 10 songs about living in a small town that are a little more encompassing and definitely not racist.

1. "Okie From Muskogee," Merle Haggard
Let’s address the elephant in the room: This song is what Aldean thought he was doing. This Haggard tune deals heavily in picturesque small-town imagery, down to an abundance of U.S. flags and clean-cut kids who would never dodge the draft or do drugs. Though originally written in earnest, the song has been reframed as more tongue-in-cheek in the decades since its release. Haggard stated in 2010 that when the song was released in 1969, he saw issues like the Vietnam War “through the eyes of a fool” and that after becoming educated, he approached performing the song from a more satirical angle. Time will tell if “Try That in Small Town” will have the same fate decades from now.

2. "Let Me Love You Like a Woman," Lana Del Rey
This song opens with the line, “I come from a small town. How about you?” Del Rey goes on to make a case for leaving Los Angeles and asks her lover to come with her: “I’m ready to leave LA and I want (need) you to come.” Though she was born in Manhattan, Del Rey was raised in Lake Placid, New York, and the song expresses yearning for the simpler life of her youth.

3. "Merry Go Round," Kacey Musgraves
On “Merry Go Round,” Musgraves rejects the rose-colored glasses through which country music normally looks at small-town life. She uses pointed and specific scenarios such as “We get bored, so we get married” to illustrate how people in her hometown were seemingly pushed into the same life as their elders due to a lack of options and peer pressure.

4. "Hot & Heavy," Lucy Dacus
The lead single from Dacus’ third album, Home Video, is more abstract in its reflectiveness. Dacus has stated that song is about outgrowing past versions of herself, such as the teenage evangelical version that grew up in Mechanicsville, Virginia. The poignant music video includes her own childhood home movies being played in a theater.

5. "Wide Open Spaces," The Chicks
Performed by the artists formerly known as The Dixie Chicks and written by Susan Gibson, “Wide Open Spaces” paints life outside the city as freeing and an opportunity for new beginnings, an ironic opposite of most songs about escaping small towns. The song was inspired by West Texas and the drive from Amarillo to Montana that Gibson’s family often made as a child.

6. "Castle on a Hill," Ed Sheeran
On this 2015 track, Sheeran gently reminds listeners that small-town nostalgia is hardly an American invention. The song tells the story of Sheeran and his group of friends growing up in Framlingham in Suffolk, England. While some may interpret the castle on a hill as a metaphor for how nostalgia makes us romanticize the ordinary, the lyric is completely literal. Sheeran’s hometown has a medieval castle.

7. "My Tennessee Mountain Home," Dolly Parton
Parton is the epitome of all that is good and wholesome about country music, and this homage to her humble upbringing reflects that. She paints a picture of an idyllic community, noting that “life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh.” Her hometown of Pittman Center, Tennessee, has a population of 454 as of the 2020 census, so it’s safe to say that she’s speaking about small-town life with a little more authority than Aldean.

8 and 9. “Dorothea” / “Tis the Damn Season,” Taylor Swift
These sister songs on Swift’s album Evermore tell the story of a model and her high-school boyfriend reconnecting in their hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi. “Dorothea” is from the perspective of the ex who never left (“This place is the same as it ever was / but you don’t like it that way”) while “Tis the Damn Season” is the perspective of the model who’s home for the holidays (“Time flies, messy as the mud on your truck tires”). The two songs juxtapose two people’s motivations for leaving versus staying in their hometown. None of these motivations are racist.

10. "More Than My Hometown," Morgan Wallen
Morgan Wallen is another country star with a history of controversy, most notably in 2021 when a video of him using racial slurs was leaked. This single from 2020, which predates the controversy and the personal growth he claims to have gone through since, expresses love for the small-town lifestyle without being aggressive and inflammatory. We’ve included it here to drive the point home that it really isn’t that hard. If the other reigning problematic meathead in Nashville can write about small-town living in a way that doesn’t appear to endorse hate crimes, anyone can.