Beyonce's new album Cowboy Carter has delighted fans and confused some critics. Photo / Andrew Harnik
The superstar’s new sound has been dismissed by Nashville country radio, while critics have accused her of cynicism. Do they have a point?
Last month, KYKC, a small country music station in Oklahoma, received a request. It was a Tuesday morning and a listener wanted to hear Beyonce’s new single, Texas Hold ‘Em, which had been out for three days and was sending ripples through the music industry thanks to its decidedly (surprisingly) country twang. Their reply was conclusive: “We do not play Beyonce at KYKC as we are a country music station.”
In fewer than 15 words, a little country station had stoked a debate that had been brewing for some time, namely: who gets to define what counts as country music?
The listener put the email on X where it was viewed 3.6 million times. Fans called in to complain; the station eventually relented. “We haven’t played her on our country station because she’s not a country artist,” the station’s general manager, Roger Harris, said. “Well, now I guess she wants to be, and we’re all for it.”
They might be “all for it”, but the suggestion, by KYKC and others, that Beyonce Knowles Carter — a 32-time Grammy winner from Houston, Texas — had simply woken up one morning and decided she fancied rebranding herself as a country star was revealing. For some, it spoke to the gatekeeping that had long kept non-white voices off the country music charts; for many, Beyonce’s venture into the genre was just the latest sign that country was changing. Some also pointed out that any true country aficionado would know there is nothing new about black country music — in fact, black musicians have been integral to country from the beginning.
In the weeks leading up to the release of her new album, Cowboy Carter — the second act in a three-part project that began in 2022 with the disco and house-influenced Renaissance — the music industry has tussled not so much over the quality of the songs, but rather on whether Beyonce doing country is, put simply, a good thing.
Some might argue the stats should speak for themselves. With Texas Hold ‘Em, she quickly became the first black woman to top the US Hot 100 with a country song. An endorsement from queen of country Dolly Parton followed. “I’m a big fan of Beyonce and very excited that she’s done a country album,” she wrote on Instagram, later hinting that Knowles Carter may have covered Jolene for the new record.
“A lot of people don’t realise Beyonce is a country girl,” Parton told Knox News. “She’s from Texas. I think we belong wherever we can do good, and her song is No 1 across every chart in the whole world, I think. So, I mean, who can argue with that?”
Rapper Azealia Banks for one. She accused Beyonce of “white woman cosplay”, suggesting the singer had used her stardom to “smother out the currently existing black artists in country music who have been grinding for years, but don’t have money to send fruit plates and backstage passes to Grammy voters”. Beyonce holds the record for the most Grammys of all time, but she is yet to take home the coveted Album of the Year. Cynics have suggested a country album, appealing to a broader church of listeners, could be the record to finally get her over the line.
In many ways the furore around the album is just a storm in a teacup (or is that a tornado in a liquor bottle?). In Nashville, the home of country music, it’s seen by many as part of a shift that has been coming for some time, as new voices (often young, black and female) with fresh takes on the country sound have been broadening the definition.
“The prevailing atmosphere these days is much more one of open minded embracing rather than suspicious rejection,” says Bob Harris, speaking over the phone from Nashville. Harris, who in April will celebrate 25 years presenting the Country Show on Radio 2, says the genre feels on the cusp of a great change. “Country music has this reputation for being southern, closed off, a bit uncool. We’re looking at a new phenomenon now.”
For Harris, it has “all been leading to this”, noting how all kinds of artists and fans are flocking to the genre (in the UK, he points out, it’s “the fastest-growing music genre right now”). The direction of travel is “towards country”, he says. “Country has now become important.”
Has there been resistance to change in Nashville? Only, he says, if you “take your barometer readings simply from mainstream country radio”.
“I truly believe that gives a distorted view of where country is at right now ... If you look more at, say, the Country Music Association and its attitude towards country, you see the CMA embracing a much wider spectrum of artists than country radio is prepared to do. And I think that’s a much more accurate barometer of the feeling in Nashville.”
Radio still holds “huge power”. “And of course there aren’t as many women on American country radio as one would like,” he says. But the way people (especially younger generations) discover new music has changed. It means radio is no longer the only way to get a foot in the door.
“There has been a huge number of really talented black artists that have been enriching country music over the last few years,” says Harris, pointing to artists like Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer. “And not only have they been accepted, but they’ve been massively supported.”
The great claim flung at the new Beyonce album is that her music could never truly be seen as country (and in fact, the metadata for the songs labelled them as pop, which some say might explain their early absence on country radio). For Alice Randall, a songwriter and professor in Nashville, if the first two songs are anything to go by, this is pure country. Randall, whose book My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future is released next month, says a country song has to contain four things: “Life is hard; God is real; the road, liquor, family, and sometimes sexuality are important compensations for the fact that life is hard; and the past is better than the present.
“When I see these four things, I think it’s very likely we are engaging with a country song. And you see those things [in these songs].”
Where are they in Texas Hold ‘Em? God is present in “nature”, says Randall. “In the tornado, in the honey. And you have the family as the compensation for life is hard in the hoe down, in the sexuality. These are the things I look for to see if something is a country song. Not only are these things present, they are arrogantly present.”
Black musicians have been “essential” to the genre ever since it was first being recorded, says Randall. “For example, Blue Yodel No. 9, recorded in 1930, is considered by most people to be the most iconic, most seminal, most significant early country record. Three people played on Blue Yodel No. 9. One was Jimmy Rogers, one was Lil Hardin Armstrong, one was Louis Armstrong. Three geniuses played on that record — two of them were black.” Their names were left off the record, she says, “but Hardin plays on every bar — her piano drives the song”.
When Randall arrived in Nashville 41 years ago to be a country songwriter, she met Charley Pride, who became country’s first African-American commercial star in the 60s and had 29 No 1 hits. “It has taken until now for a black woman to get to the No 1 slot in the charts,” says Randall, who notes “women have a harder time than men period on the country charts”.
“Beyonce’s accomplishment isn’t just an extraordinary accomplishment for black country, it’s an extraordinary accomplishment for black women in country.”
This isn’t the first time the singer has come under fire for venturing into country. Her 2016 album Lemonade featured the country song Daddy Lessons, which the Recording Academy’s country music committee rejected at the time. She brought the Chicks — these days considered country outsiders after the backlash they experienced in 2003, when they spoke out against George W. Bush — out on stage with her at the CMA Awards that year. The racist backlash to the performance was huge. Randall was among those defending the song at the time, pointing out in an essay unpicking the song that the lyrics featured all the classic ingredients of country, from “evangelical Christianity” to a “love of whiskey and guns”.
Afterwards, she recalls, “I had some verbally violent things said to me.”
Beyonce has said her new album was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t”.
“But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive.”
Randall recalls an era in Nashville when racism was rife. “When I came here I had people call me the n-word at times,” she says. “I had some man — a man whose writing I had loved before I met him — and the first time I met him, he stood 4ft away but spoke so I could hear it and said to our mutual friends, ‘I have been at this too long if I have to compete with [n-word] girls from Harvard’.”
It’s no coincidence, she says, that Beyonce is making a country album at this stage of her career, when she has already created “art that [is] undeniable”. It’s only now, says Randall, that she can make the transition to country “as a fully realised artist in multiple musical genres”.
It’s a moment, she says, that could open the doors for young black female country artists, and amplify those voices already making waves. New fans are “following Beyonce into country”, she says. “Black people who say they’ve never liked country, but are now entering into their country summer. I’ve seen people who identify as white who have suggested they didn’t think they were going to like the song, didn’t want to love the song — they love the song.”
Harris points to the rich and often overlooked history of country music that Beyonce appears to be exploring with this album. “The settlers moving across from the eastern seaboard, meeting the black people who were travelling up from the southern states, that soup that then began to establish itself and really did include elements of blues, country, bluegrass, soul, gospel ... There’s the soup, and Beyonce is exploring that.”
If the music weren’t enough to convince you this is country, the artwork — which has Beyonce clad in chaps and a cowboy hat, on a white horse, holding the American flag — should. For her part, Beyonce sounds far less interested in the label than the people who want her to own it or those who say she has no claim to it. “This ain’t a country album,” she said. “This is a Beyonce album.”
Beyonce’s new album Cowboy Carter is out now
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only