The Daily Telegraph - Features
How Beyoncé went country – and caused a storm
Her new sound has been dismissed by country radio, while critics have accused her of cynicism.
Last month, KYKC, a small country music station in Oklahoma, received a request from a listener who wanted to hear Beyoncé’s new single, Texas Hold ’Em. It was sending ripples through the music industry thanks to its surprisingly country twang, and Beyoncé quickly became the first black woman to top the US Hot 100 with a country song. KYCK replied: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.”
In less than 15 words a little country station had stoked a debate which had been brewing for some time. Namely: who gets to define what counts as country music?
The listener put the email on X, where it was viewed 3.6 million times. Fans called in to complain; the station eventually relented. “We haven’t played her on our country station because she’s not a country artist,” the station’s general manager, Roger Harris, said. “Well, now I guess she wants to be, and we’re all for it.”
They might be “all for it”, but the suggestion, by KYKC and others, that Beyoncé Knowles Carter – a 32-time Grammy winner from Houston, Texas – had simply woken up one morning and decided she fancied rebranding herself as a country star spoke to the gatekeeping that had long kept non-white voices off the country music charts. In fact, black musicians have been integral to country from the beginning.
As queen of country Dolly Parton put it: “A lot of people don’t realise Beyoncé is a country girl. She’s from Texas. I think we belong wherever we can do good, and her song is number one across every chart in the whole world, I think. So, I mean, who can argue with that?”
Rapper Azealia Banks for one. She accused Beyoncé of “white woman cosplay”, suggesting the singer had used her stardom to “smother out the currently existing black artists in country music who have been grinding for years but don’t have money to send fruit plates and backstage passes to Grammy voters”.
Beyoncé holds the record for the most Grammys of all time, but she is yet to take home the coveted album of the year. Cynics have suggested a country album, appealing to a broader church of listeners, could be the record to finally get her over the line.
In many ways the furore around the album is just a storm in a teacup. In Nashville, the home of country music, it’s seen by many as part of a shift that has been coming for some time, as new voices (often young, black and female) with fresh takes on the country sound have been broadening the definition.
“The prevailing atmosphere these days is much more one of open-minded embracing rather than suspicious rejection,” says veteran DJ Bob Harris, speaking over the phone from Nashville. Harris, who in April will celebrate 25 years presenting The Country Show on Radio 2, says the genre feels on the cusp of a great change, noting how all kinds of artists and fans are flocking to the genre (in the UK, he points out, it’s “the fastest growing music genre right now”). The direction of travel is “towards country”, he says. “Country has now become important.”
Has there been resistance to change in Nashville? Only, he says, if you “take your barometer readings simply from mainstream country radio. If you look at the Country Music Association and its attitude towards country, you see the CMA embracing a much wider spectrum of artists than country radio is prepared to do. And I think that’s a much more accurate barometer of the feeling in Nashville.”
Radio still holds “huge power” but the younger generations discover new music through other ways. “There has been a huge number of really talented black artists that have been enriching country music over the last few
years,” says Harris, pointing to artists like Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer. “And not only have they been accepted but they’ve been massively supported.”
The great claim flung at the new Beyoncé album is that her music could never truly be seen as country (and in fact, the metadata for the songs labelled them as pop, which some say might explain their early absence on country radio). For Alice Randall, a songwriter and professor in Nashville, if the first two songs are anything to go by, this is pure country. Randall, whose book My Black Country is released next month, says a country song has to contain four things: “Life is hard; God is real; the road, liquor, family, and sometimes sexuality are important compensations for the fact that life is hard; and the past is better than the present.”
Where are they in Texas Hold ’Em? God is present in “nature”, says Randall. “In the tornado, in the honey. And you have the family as the compensation for life is hard in the hoedown, in the sexuality. These are the things I look for to see if something is a country song. Not only are these things present, they are arrogantly present.”
Black musicians have been “essential” to the genre ever since it was first being recorded, says Randall, pointing to 1930’s Blue Yodel No. 9, considered by many to be the most significant early country record.
“Three people played on Blue Yodel No.9. “One was Jimmy Rogers, one was Lil Hardin Armstrong, one was Louis Armstrong. Three geniuses played on that record – two of them were black.” Their names were left off the record, she says, “but Hardin plays on every bar – her piano drives the song”. In the 1960s, Charley Pride became country’s first African American commercial star and had 29 number one hits.
This isn’t the first time Beyoncé has come under fire for venturing into country. Her 2016 album Lemonade featured the country song Daddy Lessons, which The Recording Academy’s country music committee rejected at the time. She brought the Chicks – then still known as the Dixie Chicks and ostracised from country radio after they criticised George Bush in 2003 – out on stage with her at the 2016 CMA Awards. The racist backlash to the performance was huge.
Randall defended the song, pointing out that the lyrics featured all the classic ingredients of country, from “evangelical Christianity” to a “love of whiskey and guns”. Afterwards, Randall recalls, “I had some verbally violent things said to me.”
Beyoncé has said her new album 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. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive.”
Randall recalls an era in Nashville when racism was rife. “When I came here I had people call me the N-word at times,” she says. It’s a moment, she says, which could open the doors for young black female country artists, and amplify those voices already making waves. New fans are “following Beyoncé into country”, says Randall.
Harris points to the rich and often overlooked history of country music which Beyoncé appears to be exploring with this album. “The settlers moving across from the eastern seaboard, meeting the black people who were travelling up from the southern states, that soup that then began to establish itself and really did include elements of blues, country, bluegrass, soul, gospel.”
If the music wasn’t enough to convince you this is country, the artwork – which sees Beyoncé clad in chaps and a cowboy hat, on a white horse, holding the American flag – should. For her part, Beyoncé sounds far less interested in the label than the people who want her to own it or those who say she has no claim to it. “This ain’t a country album,” she said. “This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”
‘Cowboy Carter’ is out now
In 2016, she performed with the Chicks at the CMA Awards – and the racist backlash was huge