If You Were Expecting This to Be a Country Album From Beyoncé, Think Again
Can’t say she didn’t warn us: As per her Instagram message last week, Cowboy Carter, the Act II sequel to 2022’s Renaissance, is a Beyoncé album, not a country album. “Texas Hold ’Em,” the advance single that last month made Beyoncé the first Black woman to rise to the top of a Billboard country chart, is musically still by far the most country track on it, even more so than the (overly) rewritten cover of Dolly Parton’s anthem “Jolene.” So your reaction to Cowboy Carter may depend on how much you were hoping that it would be very, very country. Me, I’m slightly disappointed, but I’m getting over it. For good reason, this was never going to be the kind of reverential historical excavation that Beyoncé lavished on house and other Black and queer electronic dance music on Act I: Renaissance. Cowboy Carter was always going to “say the things that I know will offend,” as she sings on late high point “Sweet Honey Buckiin’,” in which she also thumbs her nose at her Album of the Year losing streak at the Grammys.
Instead of a concentrate of capital-C country, what the Southwestern-born-and-bred Mrs. Knowles-Carter offers up here is a disquisition on the bastardized and abducted state of genre in American music. In that history, and in the present, as in everything in this racially riven nation, there’s a “whole lotta red in that white and blue,” as she sings in the multigenre “Ya Ya.” The album jumps off from an investigation into how it could be that a “Texas bama” like Beyoncé could, as she says on opener “Ameriican Requiem,” be told all her life that she “spoke ‘too country’ ”—then, when she came to perform “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards, be rejected as not “country ’nuff” (and by some, a lot worse). Her response is the result of a characteristically thorough excavation of genre lineage. The album cover shows Beyoncé riding onto the scene in the style of a Texas rodeo queen (complete with sash and flag) to make this act of reclamation in her own name, in her family’s name, and by extension that of Black America’s.
That could seem too much like playing celebrity savior, but to her credit, Beyoncé brings a lot of folks along with her. A couple of choices are obvious: country elders like Parton and Willie Nelson, who each make a couple of wry spoken cameos. On Nelson’s skit, in which the outlaw country legend plays a spliff-smoking “Smoke Hour” DJ on station KNTRY, Beyoncé uses a radio dial to spin through key intersections of Black and country history: early blues yodeler Charles Anderson’s 1924 “Laughing Yodel”; blues titan Son House’s 1965 “Grinnin’ in Your Face”; the 1948 version of “Down by the Riverside,” by gospel and pre-rock electric-guitar pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Chuck Berry’s foundational 1955 rock ’n’ roll classic “Maybellene,” based partly on Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys’ 1940s Western Swing hit “Ida Red”; and, finally, Georgia–to–New Jersey and gospel-to-pop migrant Roy Hamilton’s 1958 “Don’t Let Go,” written by Elvis hitmaker Otis Blackwell.* It’s a whole seminar on cultural appropriation condensed into a few skipping seconds.
Far more importantly, though, Cowboy Carter also features 82-year-old Linda Martell, who in 1969 became the first Black woman ever to play the Grand Ole Opry, and who released one acclaimed album in 1970 but was almost literally driven out of the business by white crowds shouting racial slurs. Putting Martell’s name on a Beyoncé album in 2024 really does help ensure that it doesn’t fade from history. The drawback is that the approach can become pedagogical—I wish the lines about genre that Martell was evidently assigned didn’t sound so much like the wise old woman being called in to deliver the moral. Willie and Dolly get to have more fun.
Elsewhere, the album also highlights younger artists, such as Willie Jones and Shaboozey, up-and-comers who’ve been delving into the zone between hip-hop and country for a while without breaking through. If you listen to Shaboozey’s own work, in fact, it seems his sound has inspired his fair share of Cowboy Carter’s overall approach.
But the most gratifying guest feature of all is on the second track, a straightforward cover—a rare thing on a Beyoncé studio album—of the Beatles’ 1968 “Blackbird,” which Paul McCartney wrote with the Civil Rights Movement in mind. Here, she is joined by four of the most vital young Black female country artists today: Tanner Adell, who takes a verse on her own, and on harmonies, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, and Tiera Kennedy. These are performers who’ve long been putting in the work and getting little back from the country-music industry, the kinds of artists critics have worried that Beyoncé’s star-privileged hopscotch into the genre will do little to help remedy that kind of injustice. At least, with this gesture, Beyoncé does her best to lay a heavy thumb on that scale. (Unfortunately, it also involves her stylizing the song’s title as “Blackbiird”—because this is Act II, many of the titles use gratuitous double I’s. Iit gets a biit iiriitatiing.)
Given that Beatles nod, I notice how many of this album’s songs and sequences are structured like the style-switching suites McCartney composed circa Abbey Road and Band on the Run. I also hear echoes of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the opening harmonies of “Ameriican Requiem” and, later, a dash of Sly Stone and, much more blatantly, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” The Miley Cyrus duet “II Most Wanted” is a direct descendant of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” with both doing their best husky Stevie Nicks. “Bodyguard” lifts its piano part directly from Neil Young’s “Lotta Love,” with which it also shares a theme: Where Beyoncé offers “I could be your bodyguard … I could be your Kevlar,” Young pleads, “My heart needs protection/ And so do I.” And album standout “Ya Ya” seems to pay tribute to one of the greatest Black female rockers, Tina Turner, being structured like one of her 1960s and ’70s revue medleys, and folding in Nancy Sinatra, the Beach Boys, and maybe even Patti Smith.
Fans and critics have been speculating that the third and final part of the Renaissance trilogy might find Beyoncé turning her genre spectrum analytics on rock ’n’ roll. But what if this one is both the country and the rock album? It would make sense in terms of addressing the original sins of American popular music. At the dawn of the 20th century, old-time country and blues were close stylistic siblings who were then violently cleaved apart by the forces of segregation and the music industry. First, it was “hillbilly” vs. “race” records and, later, folk or Western vs. rhythm and blues or country vs. urban. Whatever terms were used, underlying them all was really Plessy v. Ferguson, a mystification that these musics that sprang from interrelated sources were somehow diametrically opposed. What was radical about early rock ’n’ roll was that it openly brought them back together—early rock was often called the “baby” of both country and R&B. But because systemic racism was more powerful than youth enthusiasm, in large part that revolution failed—even today, nothing stops a white person from playing R&B (no matter how much, sometimes, you wish you could), but all kinds of barriers are thrown up when a Black person, especially a woman, wants to sing country.
The sheer density of sonic and intertextual information that one has to process with a Beyoncé album these days makes it impossible to assess it critically with any haste. I haven’t even mentioned many of my favorite and least favorite elements. There’s the glorious rapping on “Spaghettii,” for instance, or the whole of “Tyrant,” where the country and rock touch points recede to a fiddle sample for texture and we just get some great Beyoncé music. On the other hand, why do “Jolene” if you’re going to remove the most unique and powerful element of the song, that the narrator is baring her vulnerability and asking the mercy of her rival? That’s something that a post-Lemonade Beyoncé could never do, so she reduces it to a generic boast track about the greatness of her own marriage. However, the payoff comes in the next song, “Daughter.” In that scenario, the protagonist makes good on her threat to physically attack the other woman—but then she has to reveal another sort of vulnerability, as she questions whether even fantasizing about such acts means that she carries all the faults of her own father. The song is like a frontier gun duel or a Mexican corrido that ends unexpectedly on a therapist’s couch.
A lot of the highlights, unfortunately, don’t arrive until the second half. And this is a very long record. It’s 27 tracks stretching over about an hour and 18 minutes. A few segments of it drag, but it will take more listening to know if a number of the many more subdued, acoustic-guitar-showcasing parts might grow on me, or if some rousing parts lose their novelty. At least it begins and ends with churchy benedictions, on “Ameriican Requiem” and “Amen,” which might help prepare us for the fact that, as in church, the proceedings can get boring at times but still feel ultimately worthwhile. In fact, it begins and ends with the same benediction, only with a few keywords altered, so that when she sings “Big ideas are buried here” at the start, we might be eager to unearth them, whereas at the end, with the reconfiguration “Them old ideas are buried here,” they’re the old bad ideas about what the nation should be, and we’re likely grateful to let them die.
Renaissance also came full circle like this, but there it suggested the kind of eternal renewal and transformation-through-repetition of a transcendent DJ set. On Cowboy Carter, the message threatens to be more like (to name another country-rock touch stone) “Hotel California”: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. An endlessly self-devouring-and-regurgitating hellscape is often all too apt a description of American racial dynamics, of course. But at least on this Beyoncé album, it is accompanied by 18-wheeler-loads of celestial harmonies and other vocal pyrotechnics, perhaps more than on any of her prior solo albums—because if you are going to go country, damn sure the singing matters. In that sense, Beyoncé manages to convince us that, among all the diverse voices she brings to the foreground, those that count as underheard might, in certain ways, improbably still include her own.
