"Try That in a Small Town" is a song written by Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison, and recorded by American country music singer Jason Aldean.

The track reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, Aldean's first on that chart to date,[3] and in late July experienced the biggest sales week for a country song in over 10 years.

The video features Aldean performing in front of the courthouse at Columbia, Tennessee—where the lynching of Henry Choate had also occurred in 1927[9]—interspersed with news footage of rallies, looting, and riots directed at police officers.

[11] In response to Aldean's statements that "there isn't a single video clip that isn't real news footage," social media users and media outlets reported that the video includes multiple clips filmed outside the United States, including commercial stock footage.

[14][15] Alexandra Willingham of CNN wrote that "on the surface, it has the makings of a common country hit, with themes of small towns, guns, and rugged self-sufficience".

[16] In a review of Highway Desperado for Allmusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine stated "All its success was based on how the single and video deliberately pushed cultural buttons; strip those away, and 'Try That in a Small Town' is just another in a long line of crawling, glowering, arena-country from Aldean.

[19][20][21] Cheryl L. Keyes, chair of the department of African American studies at UCLA said, "I think there is a lack of sensitivity using that courthouse as a prop".

[25] Arwa Mahdawi from The Guardian said the dog whistling racism in the song was "difficult to ignore", and opined the small town Aldean sings about is "a product of his imagination", noting he grew up in Macon, Georgia, with a population of over 150,000, then moved to Nashville.

She wrote that the song "builds on a lineage of anti-city songs in country music that place the rural and urban along not only a moral versus immoral binary, but an implicitly racialized one as well...selective availability of home loans in suburbs and racially restrictive housing covenants in cities furthered white flight, making cities synonymous with non-whiteness."

"[30] Adeem the Artist recorded and posted on Twitter a parody titled "Sundown Town", satirizing the song's viewpoints: "we root for the cops to stop people like you".

[33][34] In more support for Aldean, singer Parker McCollum retweeted a post, originally by political commentator Matt Walsh, highlighting a perceived double-standard of those who say the song "promotes violence" while "nearly every rap song for the past 30 years has directly and enthusiastically glorified murder, drug dealing, robbery and every other violent crime, and these people say nothing".

[32] Singer-songwriter Brantley Gilbert, who co-wrote Aldean's hits "Dirt Road Anthem" and "My Kinda Party", voiced his support for Aldean and the song during several live shows, stating that many who opposed the song were "a bunch of keyboard warriors hiding behind a cell phone and laptops talking a bunch of s***".

[35][36] Responding to criticism, Aldean tweeted that the song "refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.

"[18] On the Big D and Bubba radio show in October 2023, Aldean said the Courthouse location for the video shoot was chosen for "convenience", saying, "it's 5 minutes from [his] house".