Luke Combs and Maren Morris took part in an important conversation during this year's Country Radio Seminar conference this week, as they discussed racism in country music, especially as it has related to recent events.

A few weeks ago, Combs released a new song called "The Great Divide," a song intended for a bluegrass album he had been working on during the pandemic but was inspired to release it, given the turbulence of this past year. When he released the song, he explained, "It isn’t meant to be political or try and tell you what to think or believe; that’s not my job. It’s just me saying how I felt when I wrote it and I wanted y’all to hear it." Following the release of "The Great Divide," photos had resurfaced of the country star posing with The Confederate flag, and now Combs is apologizing.

During the CRS panel, Luke recalled (via Variety), "When I released the song, there were some images that resurfaced of me, and it’s not the first time that those images have surfaced and have been used against me. And obviously those are images that I can’t take back." He continued, "Obviously in the age of the internet, those things live forever. And there is no excuse for those images. … It’s not okay. As a younger man, that was an image that I associated to mean something else. And as I’ve grown in my time as an artist, and as the world has changed drastically in the last five to seven years, I am now aware how painful that image can be to someone else.” He added, “At the time that those images existed, I wasn’t aware what that was portraying to the world and to African-American artists in Nashville that were saying, ‘Man, I really want to come in and get a deal and do this thing, but how can I be around with these images being promoted?’ And I apologize for being associated with that."