Where Beyoncé leads, we must follow – even if that’s nights on the western range, rattlesnakes, whisky and all manner of heartbreak and loss. The Houston-raised pop superstar has expanded her formidable range with the release on Friday of Cowboy Carter.
Where her last album, Renaissance, took us to Chicago for 90s house music, the latest release moves in on Nashville, incorporating blues, soul, rock, R&B and folk, and has reignited a debate over how the country genre treats artists of colour.
Beyoncé wrote on Instagram earlier this month that she’d faced criticisms when she first sang country that “forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me”.
Billboard described the album as “a jaw-dropping ode to the breadth of regional and musical subcultures of the American South” that finds Beyoncé “more experimental and more fearless than ever before”.
Many of her fans were equally impressed. At Revolution Records in New York’s musically storied Village area, fashion college student Cat Martinez, 18, said it felt like country music was in Beyoncé’s roots. She added that the singer, who grew up in Houston,Texas, “made country music in the past but her audience is broader now so maybe it’s more of a shock to people”.
Her friend Sydney Collyer, 19, pointed out that there’s country music on Lemonade, including the strongly country track Daddy Lessons. “I think its interesting her reclaiming being Black from Texas and doing country music. She’s just playing around, and I think it’s cool.”
At another store, Revival Records, beats producer Spencer Lloyd Blake, 29, thought that Beyoncé was not necessarily saying anything with the album. “At this point in her career she’s just trying things out, because why not? Why can’t she make a country album? I feel that if it wasn’t her, people wouldn’t be questioning it. Anybody can do anything…”
But he ventured: “It could be a strategic thing to build her fanbase. Country is typically a white thing, but fans are fans, and nowadays everybody is just trying to boost their streams as much as they can.”
Two songs released before the album, including Texas Hold ’Em, made Beyoncé both the first Black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and the first Black woman to send a country song to the top of the Hot 100. Moreover, Billboard noted, other Black women in country, including Reyna Roberts, Linda Martell and Tanner Adell, experienced streaming boosts. Martell and Adell are both on Cowboy Carter, along with Miley Cyrus, Willie Nelson, Post Malone, Pharrell Williams and the queen of country herself, Dolly Parton.
Beyoncé has written that she’d been working on the album for five years, a project “born out of an experience” that she had years ago where she “did not feel welcomed”, adding that “it was very clear that I wasn’t”. She has not elaborated. But she calls her album a Beyoncé album, not a country record, thereby skipping over strict – and dated – genre definitions. In her book Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, Francesca Royster said “country had always felt like a heavily guarded white musical form”.
According to Maureen Mahon, author of Black Diamond Queens and a professor of music at New York University, expectations that Black musicians would not want to perform, or would be expected to perform, country are similar to assumptions that people made about Black musicians and rock music. “People have been talking about this for years, but there have always been African Americans involved in country music,” Mahon said. “The expectation for African American musicians is that they function in certain genres and are not involved in others.
Mahon points to DeFord Bailey, who sang at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in the 1920s and 30s; Ray Charles, who grew up in the south hearing country on the radio and released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962; Charley Pride, whose first hit came with Snakes Crawl At Night in 1966; and Tina Turner, who released her country record Tina Turns the Country On! in 1974.
“Perhaps what’s happening now is that, post 2020, there’s an awareness among some of the gatekeepers to make more space. Musicians often don’t want to be confined to genres. So there are always examples of it, and people are always surprised when they emerge.”
As it was in the 1960s, when country wanted some of pop’s commercial success, the aim now could be to scoop some of country’s market. Country music tours, including by headliners like Kacey Musgraves, Morgan Wallen, Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs, are among the most reliable ticket sellers in the business. Taylor Swift was country until she became pop.
As the Beyoncé juggernaut rolls out to huge fanfare – this time in rhinestones, a cowboy hat and boots – it seems there is at least one holdout. Back at Revolution Records, Olivia Voit said she wasn’t such a fan of Beyoncé’s latest work. “I really don’t like country music, so I would say no. I like her dance music, but I just don’t like country. It’s terrible. It’s just not my vibe, you know.”
