Beyoncé has been snubbed at the Country Music Awards, with her country album, Cowboy Carter, failing to land a single nomination at the genre’s most prestigious awards.
The CMA nominees and winners are voted on each year by the 7,300 individuals in the Country Music Association trade group, after three rounds of balloting.
Singer Morgan Wallen leads this year with seven nominations, competing for the top prize, entertainer of the year, against Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson. Four of Wallen’s nominations came for the track I Had Some Help, his collaboration with Post Malone.
Cowboy Carter became the first album by a Black woman to reach No 1 on the Billboard top country albums chart. The single Texas Hold ’Em also became the first by a Black woman to claim the top spot on Billboard’s country song chart, as well as the all-genre Hot 100 chart.
But despite this success, Cowboy Carter was given limited promotion on country radio stations, which is more important in shaping the industry’s preferences than mainstream avenues. In February, a country music radio station in the US made headlines after it initially refused to play a listener’s Beyoncé request, but added her tracks to rotation after a huge online backlash.
Though Beyoncé herself has denied Cowboy Carter is a country album – “This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album,” she wrote on social media – the album was widely framed by experts and fans as a reclamation and homage to an overlooked legacy of Black Americans within country music and culture.
Beyoncé had a cool reception at the 2016 CMAs when she performed her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks, then still known as the Dixie Chicks. The singer has said that Cowboy Carter was born out of an experience in which she “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.”
However, one of Beyoncé’s collaborators on Cowboy Carter, the singer Shaboozey, is nominated for best new artist and single of the year with A Bar Song (Tipsy), which has been the No 1 country song for the past 12 weeks, and also topped the Hot 100 chart for eight. Shaboozey is the first Black male artist to top the country chart and the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously.
Winners of the CMAs will be announced at a ceremony broadcast live on US network ABC on 20 November.
Reuters contributed to this report
