Beyoncé’s new country music-inspired album Cowboy Carter comes out Friday. The cover art features the pop superstar sitting atop a white horse. She’s decked out in red, white, and blue clothing reminiscent of a barrel-racing rodeo queen, and holding an American flag. Its first single, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” has made Beyoncé the first Black woman to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. The project has also faced backlash over who exactly is qualified to make country music. In a recent Instagram post, the singer said, “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”
Her comments signal her own awareness of the tense environment for Black artists in the country music industry, says Francesca Royster, a professor of English at DePaul University and the author of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions.
The “16 Carriages” singer is a proud Texan, Royster explains, but is also critical of those roots and American culture, Royster explains. “I thought it was interesting that the flag on that album cover is cut off. I don't see it necessarily as a literal cutting off of the flag, but I think that there's something very decisive about the way that she's using patriotic imagery. I think she's in discussion with it. I don't know that she's wholeheartedly embracing it.”
Beyoncé’s first foray into the country music genre came in 2016, with her song “Daddy Lessons” on Lemonade. She famously performed the song live that same year with The Chicks at the Country Music Awards.
Royster, who dedicated a chapter in her book to the track, says she was struck by Beyoncé’s use of popular American icons, including the cowboy and outlaw. “She's also asking the question of where these past images have taken us. … ‘Daddy Lessons’ also fits into the Black feminism of Lemonade as a whole. And I think that that's why it's so fascinating. And it, to me, gives also a clue of how Beyoncé might be engaging with country music in a critical way, in a way that's adding a counter-narrative of other forms of strength.”
Country music has deep Black and Brown roots, Royster points out. Prior to the genre’s commercialization in the 1930s, she says it included facets of African American blues, the music of enslaved people, and Mexican ranchera music.
However, when record labels were trying to sell LPs and create an audience for them, the music was white-washed: “The music industry really segregated this musical form, making … what became country. And the attempt was to keep the musicians as well as the fans apart, reflecting the Jim Crow politics of the United States in the early 20th century.”
An emblematic country artist in the space is Linda Martell, who was the first Black woman to ever perform at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. Martell was born in South Carolina and her father was a sharecropper. She only released one album, “Color Me Country,” which Royster says was crafted to become a country music hit. That future was cut short when her label, Plantation Records, ceased their support of Martell. She, however, influenced future generations of Black country music artists, especially women, Royster says.
“It's really a loss because in ‘Bad Case of the Blues,’ you can really see how she's bringing together country music sounds and dance music, especially with the blues, with the mode of humor, but also melancholy and regret. And [she was] occupying the country music space with confidence and the assumption that country music can be used to tell stories about Black life.”
Today, Royster posits that Beyoncé might just have the potential — and strong fan base — to break down the barriers Black women in country music face. Her latest releases have pushed people to listen to other Black artists in the genre, including Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell, and Rhiannon Giddens (who plays banjo on “Texas Hold ‘Em”).