We saw Taylor Swift make a pop album as she was dominating the country music scene. People looked at her sideways. That’s about the same reaction Beyoncé got when she went the country music route.
People booed her at the CMAs earlier in 2024 when she performed with The Chicks. One woman in particular called her a “Black b—-” and yelled at her to get off stage.
The racism was louder than her screaming.
Beyoncé wrote on Instagram around that time to promote her new album.
“I hope that years from now, the mention of an artist’s race, as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant,” Beyoncé wrote in the post.
View this post on Instagram
Her typical genre is a mix of R&B, Pop and Soul, but “Cowboy Carter” was nominated for Best Country Album at the 2025 Grammys.
Because I grew up on Destiny’s Child, I knew Queen Bee was from Texas, her home state.
Taylor Cumpton of Time Magazine wrote, “Beyoncé Has Always Been Country.”
Why would Knowles-Carter decide to re-enter the country music industry after her own personal experience of mistreatment at the 2016 Country Music Awards? Because Knowles-Carter was raised in a household where young girls were told to tell the truth and shame the devil.
We don’t have to answer why someone should transition genres, but here we are.
There’s an attraction with the country circuit. Marcus Dowling, who covers country music for The Tennessean, calls it creative freedom around Nashville’s 100-year tradition of being welcoming.
“But once they get here, they understand that there are world class musicians and world class songwriters who literally are falling out of the trees, for lack of a better term,” Dowling told the Texas Standard. “And you’re able to engage with them fairly frequently and the level of material, because Nashville is always hungry for a hit, is peerless.”
Dowling added that country music, while welcoming, wants to be a part of the music space, the conversation.
“That creates a new space where it trickles down into Beyoncé doing ‘Cowboy Carter’ and having Rhiannon Giddens play the claw hammer banjo on ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ to all sorts of things that showcase, in a deeper and broader sense, what has always been a conversation that needed to be had about the synergy of 100 years between Black people and every single notable country tradition.”
Back to that Instagram post — she’s more than aware of the pushback.
“The criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me. act ii is a result of challenging myself, and taking my time to bend and blend genres together to create this body of work.”
“Cowboy Carter” debuted at number one in several countries and broke several chart and streaming records. In the United States, it became the first album by a Black woman to top the Top Country Albums chart.
