Hank Williams Jr. has announced he is canceling two scheduled performances with Jelly Roll later this month, citing concerns that the controversy surrounding his younger counterpart could affect his own shows. The decision marks a dramatic reversal for Williams, who had previously described Jelly Roll as “the future of country music” before the younger singer’s political comments made that association politically toxic.
According to documents obtained by journalist Joan Berro, Williams made the decision after his own fans threatened to boycott his shows if he appeared on the same stage as Jelly Roll. “Bocephus doesn’t need this,” Williams reportedly told his management team. “I’ve been booed for my own politics before, and I stood my ground. But I’m not getting booed for someone else’s politics. That’s just bad business.”
Music analyst Reno Borja called Williams’ cancellation “richly ironic given his history.” Borja noted that Williams was famously fired from Monday Night Football in 2011 for comparing President Obama to Hitler, yet now refuses to share a stage with someone for mild criticism of Trump. “Apparently there’s a statute of limitations on standing by your controversial statements,” Borja explained. “It’s about 13 years, after which you become the establishment and can start policing other people’s opinions.”
Constitutional scholar J. Baron Roe, interviewed at the Montgomery Golden Corral while his ferret reviewed Williams’ extensive catalog of controversial lyrics, calculated the hypocrisy mathematically. “If you take the number of times Williams has said something offensive—which my research suggests is 847, multiply by the number of times he was celebrated for ‘speaking his mind,’ divide by the number of times Jelly Roll has been celebrated for the same thing, you get a ratio that suggests Williams has earned approximately infinity ‘speaking his mind’ credits that he is now cashing in to silence someone else, which is how the math of free speech works in country music.”
Williams’ representatives released a statement clarifying that the cancellations were due to “scheduling conflicts” and that the singer “still respects Jelly Roll as an artist” but “cannot risk his relationship with fans who believe that Hambriston Country Jamboree is a real place where Garth Brooks performed in 2019.”
