Morgan Wallen blocked from erecting sign in Nashville over recent arrest and ‘racial slurs’

The ‘bad boy of country music’ was arrested on felony charges in April

Morgan Wallen has been prevented from erecting a 20-foot sign bearing his name over Nashville’s Broadway after the city council rejected his planning proposal citing his recent felony arrest and use of “racial slurs”.

The country star, 31, is set to open a new bar this Friday (24 May) on the city’s Honky Tonk Highway, a busy area known for its neon signs.

The establishment will be called Morgan Wallen’s This Bar, a nod to his 2019 single “This Bar”, but will not feature a sign of its own after council members voted against it by a margin of 30-3.

“I don’t want to see a billboard up with the name of a person who’s throwing chairs off of balconies and who is saying racial slurs,” At-large Council member Delishia Porterfield said, as reported by The Tennessean.

“Mr Wallen is a fellow East Tennessean. He gives all of us a bad name,” another council member reportedly said. “His comments are hateful; his actions are harmful.”

Wallen was arrested in April and charged with three felony counts after allegedly throwing a chair off the roof of another six-story Broadway bar.

Morgan Wallen attends the CMA Awards in 2023 (Getty Images)

Two police officers with the Metro Nashville Police Department said the chair landed just a few feet from them.

Officers reviewed the bar’s security footage, which reportedly showed Wallen lunging and then throwing the object over the roof.

The incident came after Wallen spent years repairing his image after being filmed using a racial slur in 2021.

Wallen was suspended from his record label after the video emerged of him using the n-word.

The footage, reportedly filmed by neighbors annoyed at the late-night disturbance and then shared by TMZ, showed Wallen coming home from a night out with friends when he yelled the racial slur at a friend twice.

In a five-minute apology video shared a week after the incident, Wallen said he was on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender” when he’d used the slur.

Revealing he’d been sober since the video was shared, he said he had accepted “some invitations from some amazing Black organizations and executives and leaders to engage in some very real and honest conversations”.

Despite his string of controversies, Wallen has remained one of the most commercially successful artists in the US.

Earlier this year his third studio album, 2023’s One Thing at a Time, spent 19 weeks at the top of the Billboard 100 charts, making it the longest-running number-one country album of all time.

Meanwhile, his single “Last Night” stayed atop the Billboard Hot 100 for 16 weeks, beating Harry Styles’s “As It Was” for the record of longest number-one run for a non-collaboration.

Read a full timeline of Wallen’s controversies here.