Beyoncé solidified herself once again as a staple within the music industry after taking home the Best Country Music Album award at the 2025 Grammys. This victory, however, faced backlash from the country music industry and its fans who view her as an outsider to the industry, despite the genre’s roots in Black culture.
Country music has always been exclusionary, with the genre traditionally uplifting white, heterosexual artists and their experiences. However, this is not indicative of the genre’s history, with country music having deep historical ties to Black people and their experiences. Still, fans and critics of the genre tend to disregard the people who built it up, something reflected in Knowles’ venture into the genre.
Although the album created buzz around Beyoncé’s shift into country music, Cowboy Carter was not her first venture into the genre. Beyoncé first tested the waters with her release of “Daddy’s Lessons” on her 2016 album “Lemonade,” which she performed alongside The Chicks at the Country Music Awards that year. The performance was a bold move, as Beyoncé — an artist heavily associated with R&B and pop — stepped into the country world with a song that blended her R&B roots with blues and Southern storytelling traditions.
This performance faced criticism and backlash, with many fans saying she didn’t belong on a stage dedicated to country music. The academy created even more outcry from fans after removing official clips of the performance before restoring them, reflecting ongoing tensions around genre boundaries, race and gatekeeping within the country genre.
Other artists experience similar problems when venturing into country music. Lil Nas X, a Black, queer artist known for his breakout in the country genre with his hit “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, only received one nomination from the Country Music Awards. The nomination was for Musical Event of the Year, an award presented before the actual award show, a step below the Single of the Year category, according to Vox.
Similarly, the 2024 breakout star Shaboozey’s hit single “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” broke world records, tying with the previously mentioned “Old Town Road” for being the longest running song on the Billboard Hot 100. Despite being one of the most successful songs in years, the artist only received two nominations and did not win for either of them. Multiple artists of color, as demonstrated by Shaboozey and Lil Nas X, have had extensive success with country songs, yet their white counterparts in the industry get recognition from award shows that they do not receive. Rather than let this barrier against her and other artists of color discourage her from the genre altogether, Beyoncé leaned on these uncomfortable experiences to craft a successful country album.
On Instagram, Knowles described the project as being “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.”
This history she describes is deep, and much of it involves Black artists and stories that have been erased from the narrative. For example, the banjo, a staple instrument of country music, was brought to America from West Africa as a part of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, according to NPR. The instrument became an integral part of American folk music and Black culture, often being played within slave plantation communities.
However, slave owners in America often sought out ways to degrade the culture of the enslaved. White slave owners often took slave’s cultural items and reappropriated them into the mainstream rural white communities within America. The banjo found its way from the hands of the enslaved to traveling minstrel groups, which were traveling performers that aimed to reaffirm the idea that Black people were not civilized enough for mainstream society.
With Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé reclaimed a stolen narrative, creating a body of art that mixed her signature R&B sound with country elements such as the banjo and Southern imagery. By touching upon themes like freedom and resilience which permeate both country and R&B, she attempted to bridge the gap between two very different genres and sides of America. Not everyone was willing to cross this bridge, however.
After the album’s release in 2024, a country radio station in Oklahoma declined requests to play “Texas Hold ‘Em,” one of the album’s lead singles. This caused a large amount of public backlash, with many fans believing the station was discriminating against Beyoncé as an artist.
In addition to the heat from the country music fan base, the album also struggled at the Country Music Awards. Despite the album topping the country music charts and debuting as number one on the Billboard 200, the album was noticeably absent from any of the 2024 nominations.
This continues the pattern previously experienced by Beyoncé and many other Black artists who venture into country music and face criticism for not upholding the traditional image held by the genre. However, that traditional image is being challenged by artists like Beyoncé, who seek to reclaim what that image means by creating albums like Cowboy Carter.
