Thoughts on "Try That in a Small Town"
I don’t follow most country music that closely. My personal musical taste always ran to traditional folk music—meaning more the Oscar Brand and Burl Ives material rather than Peter, Paul and Mary or other big-name stars. I preferred acoustic instruments, not the twangy steel guitar stuff. Occasionally a country song would suit me, but overall, I was never into it that much.
But I have been watching the controversy over Jason Aldean’s latest hit with some interest. It seems to be a total exposure of the upper class distaste for ordinary working-class Americans. And that is likely to cost them in the long run.
To be honest, I have actually never lived in a small town. I have lived in cities, in suburbs, and in rural areas. For eight years I lived about a mile away from a small town called Manchester, Indiana. Manchester is the proverbial “wide spot in the road.” The town is essentially one lot deep on each side of State Route 48, for about a mile and a half. There is a volunteer fire department building there, and a small store that was originally a local general store, now carrying about the same stuff as a modern convenience store. I haven’t been there for some years, so I don’t know if they still have a working gas pump. There were also a couple of churches—the kind of small rural church that has six cars in the lot on Sunday morning, and probably shares its preacher with one or two other churches in the area.
But there was one insight about small-town and rural life that struck me back when I was living there. In small towns and rural areas, the percentage of jerks in the population is about the same as it is in cities. You can have low-lifes, criminals, and just plain fools in a small town or rural area. But in the city, even though the percentage is the same, the sheer number of them makes a serious difference. In the city it is easier for them to link up, cooperate, form gangs and so on; and their strength against the more upright population is increased. In a less highly populated area, it’s harder for them to link up.
And it’s harder to be anonymous in a small town. Just because there are fewer of your type, you stick out more. And the more you misbehave, the more you stick out.
And I think people in small towns and rural areas live a bit closer to the land—and to reality. They know where their food comes from, and what kind of work is involved in getting it into their kitchen. Even if they are buying their meat from the grocery store now, they know people around them who raise and butcher those animals, and collect their eggs from the henhouse.
I am not saying life is necessarily easier in the small town/rural setting. But the problems are different. The last rural area I lived in did not even have electric and phone service until after WWII. The rural electric co-op was started in 1939, but they could not get copper wire until the war was over. And when they did get power to homes, the co-op had to work harder to keep the lines functioning than the city utilities did. We did not have Internet service available until 2003. Cell phones did not work reliably when we moved to Indianapolis in 2006. I had gotten a cell phone just before we moved; if I walked down our 400-foot gravel driveway to the road, sometimes it would work. If it didn’t, I had to drive over to Manchester to make a call. Even now, seventeen years later, cell phone reception can be iffy in some rural areas, and even in small towns, in Indiana. I suspect it is similar in rural areas in other states as well.
For the last twenty years or so, there has been a lot of noise in the media about the cities being the future—that everyone would live closer together, use mass transit instead of personal cars—that big cities were the future. There were a few dissenting voices, like Joel Kotkin, who checked the numbers and found that the popular mantra was not that accurate. Now, after Covid, BLM, riots in big cities, stores closing because of too much shoplifting, and more, it is becoming obvious that many of the big cities are losing population. Smaller cities and even small towns may get more attractive.