Will Shaboozey’s record run on Billboard charts lead to Grammys like it did for ‘Old Town Road’?
Country artist Shaboozey made history this week when his blockbuster crossover hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” spent a 19th week on top of the Billboard Hot 100. That tied the record for the most weeks at number-one in the history of the singles chart. His success helped fuel him to five Grammy nominations including Song of the Year and Best New Artist, but is he now too big to fail when it comes time to pick the winners?
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The only other song to spend 19 weeks atop the Hot 100 was “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus in 2019. Like “A Bar Song,” which interpolates rapper J-Kwon‘s 2004 song “Tipsy,” it was a genre-bending country crossover smash (though “Old Town Road” was controversially banished from Billboard’s country charts). It helped Nas break through at the Grammys with six nominations including Record of the Year, Best New Artist, and even Album of the Year for his 18-minute EP “7.” He ended up winning Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and Best Music Video for “Old Town Road.”
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Shaboozey didn’t show up in the Album of the Year race, so you could argue that he didn’t do as well as Nas did in his Grammy debutante year. But he’s still a big fish in a relatively small pond, especially in country categories where his is by far the most successful song on offer. As of this writing “A Bar Song” is the front-runner to win Best Country Solo Performance with 59.5% of Gold Derby users betting on it to prevail. His biggest threat there appears to be Beyoncé‘s “16 Carriages” with support from 28.2% of users. He may be lucky that Queen Bey elected not to submit her bigger hit, “Texas Hold ‘Em” to that category.
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Shaboozey also faces Beyoncé in Best Country Song, where Bey did submit “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which is up for Record and Song of the Year and could make her an even bigger fish than Shaboozey. She leads our odds there, with 65.3% of users betting on her compared to 26.3% who say it’ll be Shaboozey. But the good news for both artists is that, while they are rivals in the country field, they’re partners in another category. Beyoncé, Shaboozey, and Linda Martell collaborated on the track “Spaghetti,” which is the front-runner to win Best Melodic Rap Performance with the backing of 73.4% of users.
That may be where the awards road ends for Shaboozey this season. He currently ranks last in our odds for Song of the Year with fewer than 1% of users predicting him. And though he ranks third for Best New Artist, he only has 1.2% of our pundits predicting him there while Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter go head-to-head for the win. But if he does win the country solo and melodic rap categories, he will match the success of “Old Town Road” yet again.
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