When Beyoncé released two surprise songs during Super Bowl LVII this year, nobody anticipated that the co-lead singles to her next album would encapsulate the Southern delivery and western instrumentals most often heard in the country genre; a sound not yet fully explored by the music giant.
“Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” immediately went viral, with the first reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, making Beyoncé the first Black woman to ever do so. The success of the songs reflects Beyoncé’s dedicated fanbase and widespread adoration for the singer despite a stark genre shift.
The release of the two songs represents the continuation of a three-act project recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic; in July 2022, the release of “Renaissance,” her seventh solo album marked “act i,” as explained by Beyoncé herself in an Instagram post at the time.
On March 19, after a couple of weeks of building anticipation, Beyoncé announced that the album “Cowboy Carter,” act ii of the trilogy, would be released at the end of the month, stating, “My hope is that years from now, the mention of an artist’s race, as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant.”
Beyoncé went on to write that the project “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.”
Julia Jacobs, a culture and arts reporter for The New York Times, seemed to think that this was a reference to the Country Music Association Awards in 2016 when Beyoncé performed her first country music endeavor, “Daddy Lessons,” from the album “Lemonade,” and online reception from country fans “questioned whether the performance belonged.”
Due to the experience, Beyoncé wrote that she studied the rich, Black origins of country music, concluding with, “This ain’t a Country album. This is a Beyoncé album.”
Francesca Royster, a professor of English at DePaul University, is the author of “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions,” which was published in 2022. It’s the first book on Black country music by a Black writer.
Royster began writing the book in 2016 after speaking to her father who was a session musician for different country music artists in the ‘70s. She listened to his stories about Black country artists that she hadn’t heard before.
“I started thinking about why it is that, not only that these performers are so invisible, but that fans feel uncomfortable or shut out of country music spaces,” Royster said. “I really felt that as a kid growing up in Nashville as well.”
She described the artificially constructed boundaries of all music genres that connect to the intended marketplace and audience. When country music was first created, Royster said, the market they decided on was aimed at white audiences.
“That way of structuring the music and supporting this idea that country is something that comes out of white culture was confirmed and reinforced,” she said. “I think it follows a pattern of sidelining or minimizing black ingenuity and creativity.”
Royster noted an “ugly history of gatekeeping” regarding country music, in reference to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” in 2019 that was removed from the country to rap category on Billboard’s charts. “Daddy Lessons” was also placed in the “R&B/Hip-Hop” songs chart and Tina Turner’s 1974 country cover album, “Tina Turns the Country On!” granted her a Grammy nomination for best R&B vocal performance.
“It reflects the ideology of what is an authentic performance,” Royster said. “The ways that people even hear music is racially inclined and racially motivated.”
She also described the idea that the country genre is used as a space for white nostalgia and yearning for a pre-Civil War South.
“Because country becomes a place for our nation to put those ideas and really the ideas of white supremacy, it’s still one of the most heavily gate kept genres in my opinion,” Royster said. “It’s hard for artists of color to cross into.”
Beyoncé seems to be an exception to this rule.
The star has experimented with music in this way before. In 2018, Beyoncé headlined the Coachella music festival. Her extravagant show, as The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote, “reoriented her music, sidelining its connections to pop and framing it squarely in a lineage of Southern Black musical traditions.”
The release of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and its subsequent line dancing trend, has been, for some Black fans, the first time a country song has resonated with them.
Beyoncé appears to be providing Black country more of a mainstream audience, a powerful gesture to address the injustices of the past. But as Royster noted, this isn’t the first time the singer has addressed wrongdoings.
In the short film that was released alongside “Lemonade,” a scene features Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown’s mothers, Sybrina Fulton, Gwen Carr and Lezley McSpadden, respectively. The three Black men became national symbols of the police brutality movement in 2014.
Beyoncé also featured two-time Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens on “Texas Hold ‘Em,” where she played the banjo. Giddens has been a big proponent for raising awareness of the history of the instrument and Black culture. Royster sees her inclusion as an important teaching gesture.
“Cowboy Carter” was released March 29, becoming Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day in 2024 thus far. It is also the first time this year that a country album has held the title.
The highly anticipated album is, as NPR wrote, a “sprawling work filled with disparate influences and references, while remaining a Beyoncé album at its heart.” Similar to “Renaissance,” act ii delivers an epic narrative, drawing from country sounds, instruments and arrangements while also incorporating hip-hop, pop and even gospel. The vision follows through on shining a light on country’s origins, with features from rising stars Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Tiera Kennedy, former “X Factor” contestant Willie Jones and Linda Martell, a pioneering Black country singer, but also spans genres to discover a new sound that is distinctive and incomparable.