Beyoncé Is More Than Just A Little Bit Country

She never tried to hide it.

Beyoncé made history this week as the first Black woman to top Billboard’s country music chart. She dropped two new singles during the Super Bowl — the chart-topper “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” Both tracks are from her upcoming album, act ii, the follow-up to 2022’s Renaissance (aka Act I: Renaissance). It seems as if Beyoncé’s second act will explore the country-western genre, and she’s off to a great start. She’s the only woman to top both the Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts in their almost 66-year history. (Three men have done so previously — Ray Charles, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Justin Bieber.)

Black women can do everything, and this frustrates mediocre white people. When a Beyoncé fan in Oklahoma requested that a local radio station play “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the station refused in an email that didn’t get her name right: “We do not play Beyonce' [sic] on KYKC as we are a country music station.”

This led to a social media uproar, and KYKC general manager Roger Harris told Entertainment Weekly that this was just a misunderstanding because he’s apparently very bad at his job.

“Up until now, [Beyoncé] hasn’t been a ‘country artist,’” Harris said. “So we responded to the email in the same way we would have responded to someone requesting a Rolling Stones song on our country station.”

The Rolling Stones was perhaps not the best example for his argument.

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After what Harris described as “literally thousands of emails and non-stop phone calls,” KYKC eventually added “Texas Hold ‘Em” to its playlist. This is good for business all around, but the far-right took it as an act of woke aggression. Harris said there’s been backlash from “traditional” country music listeners “who don’t think the song deserves airplay.”

Deserves is quite a revealing word choice there. Sure, “Texas Hold ‘Em” has rhythm, but so does any good honky-tonk.

During an interview last week with actor and country music singer John Schneider, OAN host Alison Steinberg ranted, “The lefties in the entertainment industry just won’t leave any area alone, right? They just have to seize control over every aspect, don’t they?”

Schneider agreed, in perhaps the most racist way possible that didn’t involve burning a cross on live TV: “They’ve got to make their mark, just like a dog in a dog walk park. You know, every dog has to mark every tree, right?”

“People coming into country music,” Schneider said. “They seem to think that it’s easy or it’s simple or somehow it’s not as sophisticated as the music that they sing otherwise.”

Beyoncé is a legitimate country music artist because she’s recorded a country music album. It’s not a prank or anything, like when Prince would threaten Warner Bros. with a country music album. (If one exists somewhere in his vault, I’d love to hear it. He did write a song for Kenny Rogers once.) This isn’t faddish cultural appropriation, either, like when Madonna temporarily became British or Bjork.

Beyoncé’s country roots are real

Despite what Schneider grossly suggests, Beyoncé is not a dog, and she’s not defacing country music just to mark her territory. Although Schneider was born in New York, Beyoncé’s a native of Houston, Texas, and she lived there for the first two decades of her life. She grew up listening to country music. It’s part of her cultural identity. When she performed her first full-on country song “Daddy Lessons” with The Dixie Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Awards, she wasn’t attempting a “Walk This Way” moment. No, she wanted to team up with fellow artists from a genre she enjoys.

Beyoncé’s father, Dr Mathew Knowles, told BBC Asian Network that when his daughter was “a little baby, and I'm talking two-three years old, she would go down and spend the summer with my parents [in Alabama].”

“And her grandfather — my father — loved country music, and he used to sing to her. At an early age, she heard this music,” Dr. Knowles said. “And when you’re two, three years old, subconsciously music stays in your head.”

Country music singer Luke Combs covered Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as a tribute of sorts to his pleasant childhood memories listening to Chapman’s album while riding in his father’s truck. Music is the gift we share with those we love. Only the truly twisted would deny any form of music to someone because of their background.

Some People Have Listened To Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ But Never Actually Heard It

Tina Knowles posted an Instagram video featuring images of her daughter in cowboy hats and other fashions true to her heritage. Knowles wrote:

We have always celebrated Cowboy Culture growing up in Texas. We also always understood that it was not just about it belonging to White culture only. In Texas there is a huge black cowboy culture. Why do you think that my kids have integrated it into their fashion and art since the beginning? When people ask why is Beyonce wearing cowboy hats? It’s really funny. I actually laugh because it’s been there since she was a kid, we went to rodeos every year and my whole family dressed in western fashion.

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Country music is part of the Black American experience

Francesca T. Royster wrote last year that “Black women have deep roots in country music, and are among the originators of the genre.” A version of the banjo came to America with enslaved people. (Rhiannon Giddens plays damn good banjo on “Texas Hold ‘Em.”) Black woman musicians Elizabeth Cotten and Etta Baker were masters of what you might call “country blues.”

However, Jim Crow segregated music as well as people. By the 1920s, the record industry had separate but unequal categories for “hillbilly” records ( “country and western” and soon just “country”) that was marketed to white audiences and “race” music (the blues) that was considered strictly for Black ears. Race music was not permitted mainstream success, and major commercial networks would hire white singers to cover “race” songs. This practice would continue for decades, when white performers like Pat Boone would enjoy commercial success with a cover of a Black artist’s original song.

The reality is that Black artists have influenced almost every form of music in the U.S. A Black person, especially with southern roots, performing a country song isn’t “seizing control” of another culture’s music. They are reclaiming part of their own.

Charley Pride broke country music’s commercial color barrier in the mid-1960s. His first records credited him as “Country Charley Pride” and were submitted to radio stations without a photo. He was from a family of sharecroppers in Sledge, Mississippi, but he nonetheless had to prove his country bonafides to a skeptical audience. In a 2011 interview with journalist Jewly Height, he recalled, “People used to say to me, ‘ With a voice like yours, why do you have to sing that stuff?’ They used to say it like that. ‘You could sing anything you want to.’ I said, ‘Well I’m not saying I could sing anything I want to, but I do feel that I sing the basics of American music: country, gospel and the blues. I think I’m the epitome of all of that. And not only when you hear me, but when you see me, too.’”

Linda Martell was the first Black woman to enjoy commercial success as a country music artist. Her album, Color Me Country, was released in 1970 on the Plantation Records label. (She wasn’t thrilled with the name.) Here she is singing her hit, “Bad Case Of The Blues.”

It’s undeniably country, but it’s also gospel, soul, R&B. Even her impressive yodeling has roots in Black folk-singing traditions. Jimmie Rodgers, the supposed “father of country music,” is believed to have combined Swiss Alpine yodeling with the “Black falsetto” style from blues singers. Music critic Abbe Nilles said Rodgers sounded like a “White man gone Black,” and his 1928 review of Rodgers’ Blue Yodel No. II appeared with the heading “White man singing black songs.”

Country music was never an exclusively white genre, no matter how much John Schneider might wish. It’s not just good old boys driving around listening to “Dixie.” Beyoncé’s net worth is about a jillion dollars (in cash). She didn’t record a country album for the money or the attention. She did it because this music is as much hers as it is any “traditional” country music fan’s.

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