This isn’t country music!” angry bigots have been screaming since the first single dropped. More accurately, this isn’t their country music. This is Cowboy Carter’s country music, the genre experienced through the lens of an unapologetic black Texas woman, the gender-bending title casually defiant. We have entered Beyoncé Country, where she makes the rules, and we are blessed to visit for 1 hour, 18 minutes.
Cowboy Carter holds layer upon layer of deeply informed, intentional education. To the masses, it’s full of bangers for listeners to sing or dance to on TikTok, but for many others, especially black women who have been pushed into the margins of a genre that has been designed to exclude them, it is a manifesto. But is this the Trojan horse-full of hope that the fierce fire of Queen B will finally vanquish the gatekeepers whom those with less power and fame do not have the resources to defeat? I can’t even scratch the surface of its importance, so I urge you to read and listen to the words of black women who have fought for decades to make their home in the hostile terrain of country music. Women like Mickey Guyton, Rissi Palmer (host of Colour Me Country on Apple Radio) Holly G (founder of The Black Opry, a collective of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Colour] country artists) and countless more.
In a study by Dr Jada Watson, a professor of information science who specialises in the study of representation in radio programming, only 9.8% of US country radio airplay was for songs by women in 2023. For black women, that percentage dwindles to a devastating 0.02%. This is the Wild West town into which Beyoncé is riding her white horse.
This isn’t her first foray into country music: she performed her country song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 CMA awards, where audience members shouted “Get that black b*tch off the stage” and a male country star made a show of walking out. The backlash online was worse, and the CMA removed her performance from its social media due to the avalanche of racist hate speech. Beyoncé referenced this incident in her album announcement and said it made her dive deeper into the history of country music and study the rich musical archive of black artists.
From spotlighting Linda Martell – the first black woman to have a top-25 hit on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs in 1969 – to entering the Africa-originating banjo through the performance of musical preservationist Rhiannon Giddens on the opening bars of Texas Hold ‘Em, the collaborations on this album are moving and a delight. Having four up-and-coming black female country artists accompany her on Blackbird, a song Paul McCartney wrote to uplift black women during the Civil Rights era, is perfection.
Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton introduce tracks throughout the album, which feels like an endorsement from the elders. I can almost see Beyoncé smirking like a beloved granddaughter, “You gonna argue with my Texas Granddaddy and the family matriarch?” Interpolations of Jolene and Patsy Cline’s I Fall to Pieces sit easily alongside trap beats, pulling from a musical genre that white male country artists use heavily in their songs that dominate the country charts, but which people decried as “not country” when rapper Lil Nas X used one in Old Town Road, resulting in its removal from the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
To quote Alice Randall, the first black woman to co-write a No 1 country hit, “It’s a museum, it’s an education, it’s an all-out celebration of country, and it’s black as the winning ace of spades!”
