LOS ANGELES (AP) — First, Beyoncé arrived at the 2024 Grammy Awards in full cowboy regalia — making a statement without saying a word. Then, during the Super Bowl, she dropped two hybrid country songs: “Texas Hold 'Em” and “16 Carriages.” All of that heralded her latest album, “Act ll: Cowboy Carter,” out Friday.
As a Black woman reclaiming country music, she stands in opposition to stereotypical associations of the genre with whiteness. “Cowboy Carter” was five years in the making, a direct result of what Beyoncé has called “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” most likely a reference to a 2016 CMAs performance that resulted in racist backlash.
Fast forward eight years, and last month, she became the first Black woman to ever top Billboard’s country music chart. The “Cowboy Carter” doesn't shy away from country: the track list has teased potential collaborations with Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson and included a mention of the "Chitlin' Circuit,” a Jim Crow-era network of Black entertainment venues. One song is titled "The Linda Martell Show,” after the performer who became the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry.
Nevertheless, she declared on social media, “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album” — in 10 words separating herself from the industry while still identifying herself as someone working in and with the genre.
BEYONCÉ, TEXAS AND ‘DADDY LESSONS’
Beyoncé hails from Houston, a city with a rich musical interplay of “blues and country and hip-hop,” says Francesca T. Royster, a DePaul University professor and author of “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions.”
“The iconography of Texas as a place of freedom and boldness, those ideas have definitely been part of Beyonce’s ongoing star image,” Royster says.
Houston is also home to the rodeo, the country's oldest Black trail ride, and Black cowboy culture — in 1800s Texas, one in four cowhands were Black. Royster says Beyoncé has inherited this history by exploring country sounds, as evidenced on the country-zydeco-R&B barnburner “Daddy Lessons” from 2016's groundbreaking "Lemonade."
At the time, though, the Recording Academy rejected its inclusion in the Grammys' country categories. “Daddy Lessons” was also kept off country radio, says Alice Randall, author of “My Black Country” and the first Black woman to write a country No. 1 hit in Trisha Yearwood's “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)."
The hybridized approach of “Daddy Lessons” came two years before Lil Nas X's “Old Town Road” would raise similar questions of what kind of artists are embraced by the country music industry when they experiment with different styles.THE 2016 CMAs
If there is a lightning rod country music moment in Beyoncé's career to date, it's her performance of “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Awards with The Chicks, six days before Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election.
“The CMAs are an important place to stage and test the ways that the genre is willing to collaborate and connect,” says Royster.
The award show regularly welcomes pop musicians to perform alongside country acts in an attempt to reach new audiences — Justin Timberlake and Chris Stapleton performed together the year prior.
Critics celebrated the powerful performance, but online, Beyoncé was met with racist backlash and some viewers labeled her “anti-American.”
“This was an especially difficult time to perform racial crossing because of the heightened tensions around the election and the unresolved tension of The Chicks,” Royster says.
In 2003, just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, The Chicks' Natalie Maines said they were ashamed to be from the same state as then-President George W. Bush. There was immense backlash that “reflected the kind of preferences that country music ended up moving towards in that post-9/11 moment, where country radio shunned The Chicks, stopped playing their music, and instead, played these jingoistic anthems and helped popularize them,” says Amanda Martinez, author of the upcoming “Gone Country: How Nashville Transformed a Music Genre into a Lifestyle Brand."