“She’s gone country, look at them boots / She’s gone country, back to her roots / She’s gone country, a new kind of suit / She’s gone country, here she comes“
Introduction:
Welcome to In The Loop, and today, we’re going to dive into one of my favorite topics to talk about, a topic that sure isn’t loaded with a minefield of touchy subjects arising from well-documented historical grievances. That’s right, today, we’re once again diving into the discourse surrounding race and country music!
(*shudders*)
Yeah, we’re back at it again, sorry I don’t have the power to dictate which discourses become relevant at any given time. I guess it’s not surprising we’re diving back into the well this soon, given the recent prominence of country music and the firestorm of discourse it generated last year. But there’s a very good reason why we’re doing this again—and it’s because the song we’re discussing today has directly and intentionally invoked this discourse. So I guess it’s time for another history lesson about one of music history’s most contentious intersections. When we think of country music, we often have a very specific image in our heads, right? That of cowboys in chapped leather and ten gallon hats, riding on horseback and barking orders in a distinct Southern drawl. But there’s one element of that image that sticks out more than anything else, and that’s the lily-white complexion of nearly all of those who populare the genre. Country music is a Caucasified genre in the public’s imagination, and that’s not a wholly unwarranted conclusion, given that the genre has a well-established historical pattern of excluding non-white performers, many of whom have struggled to break into the industry.
And if you don’t know much about the genre, you’d probably think it’s just the natural result of the genre’s roots, as the artistic and musical expression of the white rural American working class. But in truth, country music was not always dominated by White people, and its current state was not inevitable. Cowboy culture always had a Black and Mexican presence in its inception—the very concept of the cowboy has Hispanic roots, and in real life, most cowboys were of Black or Mexican extraction, which shouldn’t be that surprising given the large Black population of the South, and the fact that Texas used to be part of Mexico. As for the music, numerous country elements had their roots in African culture, like the banjo, which was formerly seen as a Black instrument and was descended from West African string instruments. There were plenty of Black and Mexican performers at the genre’s inception, and considering how similar country slang, country lyrical cadences and country imagery is to other historically Black genres like blues and rock and roll, the origins of the genre probably should be even more obvious to us.
But they’re not, because the role of Black artists in shaping country music was almost completely erased by a series of segregationist marketing policies that deliberately sought to market country music exclusively for white audience. By the turn of the 20th century, country music and its instruments were gradually becoming the soundtrack of minstrel shows all throughout the country; hell, the very reason why the banjo became a White person’s instrument was because Black performers taught future White minstrel show performers how to play it. Ironically, this is how most White people were introduced to the genre, and soon, they began adopting it unironically, leading to the rise of hillbilly music, and later, country music proper. By the 1920s, the industry had sensed the potential of this burgeoning new genre, and they knew exactly who they wanted to market it to. White radio stations would deliberately limit their setlists to white country artists while conveniently excluding black artists, all in a deliberate attempt to cultivate a distinctly white identity for the genre despite being rooted in profoundly Black musical styles.
But this change didn’t happen overnight, and even at the height of Jim Crow segregation, many of country and hillbilly’s Black influences were still apparent at the genre’s inception. Most early country music still bore audible traces of slave music, Negro spirituals, field songs, hymns, and the blues. The harmony between rural White and rural Black America was still there at the beginning, but of course the big labels couldn’t sell this kind of music if it was integrated. So as the decades went on, the latter half of that equation would slowly be edged out into its own little musical ghetto, which radio programmers took to calling “rhythm and blues”. And as we all know, this would not be the last time these race-based exclusions would take place in popular music, which is why, as we progress into a (hopefully) more enlightened age, we’ve been having more and more of these types of conversations.
And it’s a discourse that’s reared its ugly head time and time again, well before this year, thanks to a highly publicized series of events which put the insularity of Nashville and its institutional reluctance to open itself up to diverse artists and perspectives. Just a couple of years ago, Billboard found itself in hot water when it refused to classify “Old Town Road” as a country song, despite sounding more country than most of the songs that had been filling up the Top 10 of the country charts up to that point. Just last year, country music found itself once again at the center of national discourse after one of its biggest stars, Morgan Wallen, bounced back from being publicly blacklisted for saying the N word, and we all collectively debated about whether it was “right” to let him back in. When the dust had settled on that issue, the race in country music was dragged back into the spotlight when two right-wing country songs, one that was basically a pro-lynching anthem, and another that directly invoked the welfare queen stereotype historically associated with Black women, went back-to-back atop the Hot 100. It has been a fraught time for the genre, to say the least, so if we’re still feeling some spillover effects in 2024, it probably shouldn’t be that surprising.
So in 2024, after the dust has settled on country music’s recent turbulent brush with the mainstream, the fact of a Black woman making it her explicit, publicly-stated mission to reclaim this lost genre for Black people… it’s bound to stir up some shit, ya feel?
The song:
The Queen Bee is back.
Beyonce has had a weird couple of years, hasn’t she? It’s weird to call the early 2020s her “twilight period”, but strictly speaking, that’s what it is, considering we’re decades past her peak as a hitmaker and she’s hardly the freshest face in the biz. And yet, despite her age and longevity in the industry, it doesn’t feel like she’s overstayed her welcome, exactly. But that’s mostly because, after spending a good solid decade as primarily an album artist, she just suddenly decided out of nowhere to become a big singles-based hitmaker who had actual crossover smashes again. In 2022, she returned to the pop scene in a big way with her album Renaissance, which, true to form, revitalized her music career after half a decade of relative inactivity. “Break My Soul”, that album’s lead single, became her biggest crossover hit since 2009, and it deserved to be because it is one of her best ever singles. It really is the kind of song that only gets better with time; and though I was lukewarm on the song when it first came out, I now count it among my favorite songs of the decade. Each time I listen to it, I love it just a little bit more.
But make no mistake; her return to a mostly singles-based format with big flashy rollouts has not diminished her artistic trajectory in the slightest, because when you dig a bit deeper into Renaissance the album, it’s probably her most groundbreaking and experimental record yet. The use of “Break My Soul” as a lead single encapsulates the album’s thrust pretty succinctly — it’s a throwback to the glory days of early ‘90s house music, specifically the era in which the genre finally exploded into the mainstream after a decade of being limited to underground black and gay clubs in Chicago — but if you’re relying solely on the single to get a feel of the album, you might think it never goes beyond being mere pastiche. No, instead, Renaissance reverse-engineers and reinvents disco, house music, nu disco, electro, and a whole slew of Black genres which had become unfairly forgotten or maligned, all with the stated aim of reclaiming these genres from the White industry that sanitized them and hollowed them out only to discard them when they no longer proved useful.
And that seems to be the impulse guiding her second album, which has been marketed as the sequel to Renaissance, except for which genre she’s reclaiming. That’s right, this time, she’s taking it down the Mason-Dixon line and giving us some good ol’ Southern fried country music. “Texas Hold ‘em” is a straight up blend of country pop and western soul built around a stomping line-dance rhythm whose country-folk bona fides really show themselves in the song’s DNA, given that it’s built around plucked banjo delivered by none other than Black country folk legend Rhiannon Giddens, and Beyonce’s collaborators range from soul legends like Raphael Saadiq to more singer-songwriter adjacent types like co-writer Elizabeth Lowell Boland, who’s written tracks for artists like Jojo, Madison Beer, and Hailee Steinfeld.
In all seriousness, though, this song has gotten lots of attention specifically because it felt like such a swerve for most people, who weren’t ever expecting Beyonce to go in this direction. A glamorous pop star like Beyonce going for a rootsy down-to-earth genre like country music does not sound like something that would’ve been on the average pop music listener’s Bingo Card. But this isn’t the first time she’s dipped her toes into country. She’s been incorporating country influences as early as 2006’s Bday, up to and including a performance of “Irreplaceable” with 2000s country-pop band Sugarland. But her biggest and most prominent dance with the genre thus far might be when she included outlaw ballad as one of her album tracks off 2016’s Lemonade called “Daddy Lessons”, a gritty guitar-driven slow-burn that was such a sharp swerve away from her usual style that it got all the critics talking that year. There’s definitely precedent for a country Beyonce; she is a Texas native, a Houston native specifically, which means she’s long steeped into the area’s burgeoning outlaw country and zydeco scenes; and she’s performed live with the likes of Dolly Parton and the Chicks.
So she’s got the bona fides. Where in the hell did the backlash come from? Because there are certain segments of the country music audience that have not reacted well to this song at all. It’s not a big backlash (and it likely couldn’t have been considering who we’re talking about) and the song has proven largely popular on country radio, but there were murmurs of Beyonce “not being country enough”, with certain country stations even refusing to play the song and only caving because of mounting public pressure. Some have rolled their eyes at the very notion peddled by music outlets that this song will galvanize country music’s crossover success and allow it to become more accessible to a wider audience.
But as always, as with most things, it’s a question of history, and we’ll have to look at that history to determine why a Black woman seemingly can’t release a country song without sparking some kind of national conversation.
The review:
Okay, I’m sure the answer to that lead off question is plainly obvious to most of you, myself included, but I want to really take a deep dive here intothe song, because it’s caused such a firestorm of discourse that it’s really worth unpacking in full. This song has ignited a necessary, long-overdue conversation about topics related to race relations in America, and especially how it highlights the still-lingering after-effects of segregation in our pop music charts and genre classifications. I am aware of that, and I do not mean to invalidate any of that when I open the article by acknowledging the way I first felt listening to this song—which is that Beyonce and country music just did not mix on paper, like just as a proposition, and I feel like it’s that misguided, surface-level reading that has steered most of the discourse on this song.
Because there’s a certain breed of non-country artist for whom it’s easy to imagine an eventual shift into Nashville, usually because they bear a certain kind of twangy, down-to-earth energy that lends itself well to country music—the “hillbilly bone”, if you will. Usually it’s hard rockers and hair metal balladeers like Poison, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard, all of whom made twangy, heartland rock that you could easily imagine aging gracefully into an actual country demographic given the right set of circumstances. But this isn’t just limited to rock bands, either; there are hip-hop artists like Nelly and Ludacris that have managed to slot into the genre surprisingly well precisely because of how twangy they are; and even in the glamorous world of pop stardom, there are just artists who you’d mentally slot into the Nashville space better, artists like Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, even goddamn Cyndi Lauper, of all people, all have that Southern warmth and that distinct sense of accessibility associated with country artists. By contrast, there are artists for whom this hillbilly bone just does not exist (sorry to burst your bubble, Blake Shelton), and it usually tends to be the more glamorous, cosmopolitan urbanite types—acts like Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Bruno Mars, any one of the five Spice Girls, and for the longest time, I’m willing to bet most people mentally filed Beyonce in that camp. I know I have in the past.
But that’s me saying this as a guy who knows about Beyonce’s forays into country music. Why did I still feel that inherent mismatch between artist and genre given the particular history of said artist. And then it got me thinking about how I perceived country music in the first place—maybe it wasn’t the artist herself that stuck out like a sore thumb, but the way I had mentally constructed an image of country music so as to crowd out an artist like Beyonce. That’s something I’ve been reckoning with when it comes to most genres of music, but it’s especially prescient in a genre like country music, which has had a history of being an insular, walled-off genre hostile to outsiders. Given that Beyonce has only ever tangentially intersected with Nashville, it was always easy to see any one of her attempts at country crossover to be mere genre tourism, the same way a Halsey could release “You Should Be Sad” with a video that was such a campy, over-the-top parody of TikTok-ified country aesthetics that it pissed off a whole bunch of country fans over what they perceived as condescension.
I think back to Lil Nas X, the last Black person who rode a country aesthetic to crossover success (and when I say this I am of course referring to non-country artists, not actual country artists who are Black), and he was basically accused of doing the same thing Beyonce is doing now—being a poser. He’s not a real country artist, he’s a rapper who released one vaguely country-ish sounding song; that makes you a country artist as much as it makes Drake a dancehall artist for releasing “One Dance” and “Controlla”. That’s the reason why Billboard excluded him from the country charts in the first place—and let’s be clear, that was Billboard’s decision, not Nashville’s—the reason they didn’t play him was because they didn’t really count him as a country artist. The thing is, if you divorce that judgment call from the fraught history of country music and race, Billboard is kind of right? What made “Old Town Road” country to begin with? Because the song isn’t really built on any of country music’s traditional elements—the beat is built off of an atmospheric Nine Inch Nails composition, out of a segment that sounded brooding enough to loop over and over into a vaguely country-ish sound, but it’s not country music, strictly speaking. And Lil Nas X’s delivery is arguably even more condescending and inauthentic than Beyonce’s is; he invokes caricatured country tropes like “bullriding and boobies” and if it weren’t for the obvious heart and sincerity the kid was putting in his performance, the song would’ve never graduated past being a meme. In hindsight, it’s laughable to call Lil Nas X a country artist, especially when you consider the career path he eventually took.
And yet, he sparked a national conversation anyway, and much of the sentiment that drove that conversation still holds today. You can attribute that firestorm of discourse largely to Billboard’s boneheaded decision to impose rigid classifications onto musical genres. To exclude Lil Nas X from being considered country, Billboard would’ve had to have a rock-solid definition of “country”, so what was it? Given that in the years preceding “Old Town Road”, the Billboard country charts were allowing shit like “Burnin’ It Down”, “The Fighter” and “Meant to Be” to chart, it’s laughable to then suddenly insist on a rigid definition of country music as if to vaguely gesture towards championing its integrity or something. It’s not difficult to see why outside observers were suspicious of what metrics Billboard was using to bar Lil Nas X from the chart. In a similar vein, Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘em” is far more authentic and, purely as a song, its country bona fides are less open to debate, so it’s ridiculous that people are somehow finding ways to take issue with its genre classification. Does it look country? Does it feel country? Does it sound country? If the answer to all three questions is “yes”, then what about it, makes it not country?
And that’s what brought me back to scrutinizing my own deeply embedded notions of what country music “should” sound like, and the place certain performers have in it vis-a-vis others of a different extraction. I’ll avoid beating around the bush now—even for a non-white person like me, especially as someone who doesn’t even live in America, it’s harder to imagine non-White people operating in a country space; that fact, in and of itself, already forms a mental barrier. Non-White performers have made great strides in a lot of genres, but the ghetto-ization of Black and other non-White performers (but Black people especially) has deeply rooted itself in the pop cultural consciousness; most of us can’t even imagine, for instance, a primarily Black alternative rock band. So the charge of “genre tourism” levied against an act like Beyoncé is definitely something that deserves critical reexamination, considering that, in all other respects, she definitely bears all the hallmarks of someone with a natural knack for the genre. She’s from Texas, which has historically been a hotbed for country music; she’s always had a certain drawl-iness in her music regardless of genre, and despite all her glitz and glam, she’s always thrown it back to her people and, at least in terms of public image, she’s never come off as too far divorced from her roots, which is not something you can say about most pop stars, even those of color (looking at you especially, Jennifer Lopez).
That said, I can’t say I don’t understand, at least in part, where this charge of genre tourism comes from, and I don’t think it’s purely a race thing, either. Consider the subject matter of “Texas Hold ‘em”—it’s about a hoedown set in a dive bar, and it uses some pretty pointed country imagery that would look real weird on someone who hasn’t exactly lived that life. If you know anything about Beyoncé, you know that she comes from a background where she has never had to worry about whether her next meal was even gonna come along, you feel? Most country imagery was shaped by the perspectives of the rural working class, including the very imagery she invokes on “Texas Hold ‘Em”, so to hear this fabulously wealthy rich woman appropriating that imagery might be enough to get a redneck listener saying, “Hey, you can’t use that, those our our words. My culture is not your costume!” I kid, of course, but I have heard people make that argument, both ironically and unironically, and it’s something that adds to the perception of her as an outsider to country music. To some degree, I get it; that’s also something I observed about her previous big hit, “Break My Soul”, in which she cosplays as a rank-and-file worker destressing from her 9 to 5 grind.
In fact, that’s something that initially made me roll my eyes about the fervent way the media has covered Beyoncé’s turn toward country. There’s a lot of talk about how Beyoncé’s runaway crossover success with a country song is what’s going to bring the genre to a wider audience, that she’s going to break the glass ceiling that had previously rendered country music inaccessible to the pop audience. My first instinct was to say, “Okay, let’s chill the fuck out for a bit”—Beyoncé is not the one who’s gonna blow open the doors for country music, Gia Gunn-style. Country music has been around for decades, and its crossover success has ebbed and flowed throughout the decades, but the genre has crossed over long before Beyoncé came along. It also just felt weird to call Beyoncé the one who was going to “reclaim” country music for Black people, given that there have been plenty of Black country musicians before her and it feels like an erasure of their collective legacy to heap that achievement only to Beyoncé, as if those other country artists somehow weren’t Black enough to “reclaim” the genre. To some degree, I still subscribe to this view—the more we depart from the standard stan conquering hero narratives, the better we are as a society.
But I ultimately came around to not only agreeing with that consensus take, but reconciling my previous misgivings about it by viewing it as a sad commentary about the way the country music establishment has systematically excluded Black and other non-White artists. To a degree, Beyoncé really is going to bust open the great wall separating Nashville from the rest of the world, but that’s because she has the clout and universal appeal to make such a feat possible. Beyonce is going to set a milestone for Black country artists not by overshadowing everyone who came before her, but by virtue of the fact that there’s no one else with her stature doing what she’s doing in country music. Many other Black country artists have, quite evidently, been denied the same kind of recognition that Beyoncé has had the privilege to achieve, and it really says something that before Beyonce’s recent rocket to the #1 spot, the first Black female artist to hit #1 was goddamn Tracy Chapman, purely off songwriting credits through the Luke Combs cover of her song “Fast Car”. That is a barren market if I’ve ever seen one. So despite the induced eyerolls I alluded to earlier, at the end of the day, it’s undoubtedly a net good that “Texas Hold ‘em” has been cited as an inspiration by many upcoming Black country artists, especially women. And if the public coverage is anything to go by, the song’s impact isn’t limited to Black people, either—even people in international markets like the UK, which has historically been resistant to country music, have been embracing Nashville thanks to Beyonce.
But I can still see why people would be uncomfortable by this perceived outsider taking their genre and bringing it to a wider audience by making it “fashionable”, as if to imply that country music was entirely unfashionable before this. No, scratch that, country music was always unfashionable and cheesy before this, but implying that there’s something inherently negative about that is where people draw the line. Of course, that can be chalked up more to the public’s shallow perception of the genre than anything Beyoncé herself has done—which, in a supreme twist of irony, is something you can pin chiefly on the genre’s aforementioned tendency towards insularity. If country music needed to become more accessible, it’s because the genre has always come off as being hostile to outsiders. Now, whether that’s an accurate assessment or not is up for debate—and it’s well worth noting that for decades country stars have been desperately trying to court rappers and other scions of cooler, hipper genres—but incidents like the Lil Nas X backlash and last year’s explosion of right-wing country songs do little to help matters. There’s nothing wrong with country music being unfashionably earnest; hell, that’s where most of its charm comes from. But it’s clear country music is in need of a serious makeover, and while Beyoncé might not be the ideal person to deliver it, she’s what we got, so you might as well roll with it.
And as for the charge that Beyoncé is putting on a yee-haw costume despite supposedly not having had the necessary background, that would be a valid charge if that didn’t also describe the artistic process of every single country artist in existence. Most country artists don’t even write their own songs, and even the ones that do rarely ever draw from their real lived experiences. Dolly Parton didn’t write “Jolene” about a real woman who was actually going after her husband; and neither did Miranda Lambert write “The House That Built Me” about her real-life childhood home in Texas. “Goodbye Earl”, one of the Chicks’ most subversively girl power-y songs, was originally written by a man for men. Plenty of country legends, from George Strait to Reba McEntire to Blake Shelton, never wrote any of his own songs. So why is Beyoncé being held to some gold standard of authenticity that most country artists aren’t even held to? Country music has never been a singer-songwriter’s genre, unlike rock and roll, folk or hip-hop; it’s always been about performance and pageantry. It’s more like pop music, in that regard. So as the ultimate pop diva, putting on a goddamn good show by adopting a new concept is entirely within Beyoncé’s wheelhouse.
Now, you might notice I haven’t discussed the actual song yet. There’s a reason for that, but ultimately I had to structure this article the way I did because, honestly I don’t personally love this song the way most people seem to. And given everything I’ve just said, it might shock you to learn that the reason why is because I don’t think she slots into the song very well. Again, this is not to say she can’t do country music—”Daddy Lessons” should immediately count against that—but this laid-back, Her voice doesn’t fit the low, gritty arrangement she’s chosen—the key is set too low and she’s evidently straining under the weight of her lower register, which she does not seem entirely comfortable with. But at this stage in her career, the drawl feels stilted and unnatural on her, and she lacks the necessary warmth and ease in her voice that makes or breaks most country songs. I don’t really agree with how slow it is, either; it lacks that kick, that driving beat that makes any good honky-tonk song work. There’s no energy or power behind it, which is poison to a Beyoncé song. A good Beyoncé song needs to have that intensity and power to really soar and tap into her singular appeal.. I don’t really know if this is a style that suits her, and I can’t say I really took to the song despite everything it’s achieved.
And honestly, I can’t say it’s the most authentic stab at country music, either. One writer on The Singles Jukebox said it best—it’s what a pop star thinks country music should sound like, with the stomp-clamp rhythms and all the country lingo strewn about without much in the way of rhyme or reason. Again, that criticism is specific to this one song, and not Beyoncé’s other stabs at country music, but it’s unfortunately very apparent that this song was only ever meant to be a vague gesture towards country at best. I think that by trying to sound as stereotypically country as she possibly could, Beyoncé wound up achieving her goal in the worst way possible—by creating something so by-the-numbers and generic that it doesn’t really register beyond mild amusement. It’s not bad, but it’s not really a Beyoncé song, either; it’s a tossed It’s a lead-in statement more than it is a song; hell, if you stretch a little, you might even consider this an “I’m back bitch!” single, given that it’s a big flashy statement with a hollow center. It’s barnyard caricature, really, and not even the excellent banjo playing of Rhiannon Giddens can stop the song from being that.
The verdict:
7/10
While I don’t like the song exactly, I can’t deny that, from a purely objective lens, it’s a pretty good song with some solid country bona fides behind it. My objections to it are more in the execution than anything else. I understand that Beyoncé may have felt the need to kick off this project with a more conventional-sounding country single, y’know, to ground her legitimacy first before subverting the tropes, kind of like how the Star Wars sequel trilogy started with a re-telling of the 1977 original before releasing the subversive controversial follow-up. But given that this is goddamn Beyonce we’re talking about, I feel like she could’ve stood to take some more risks here. Is it bad? No, it’s just lackluster, but even a lackluster Beyoncé song rates a 7/10 from me.
But I want to make it clear that my own opinion of the song shouldn’t detract from the significance of what it represents. Is it an overall net good for an issue that’s long been underexplored and underrepresented in mainstream discourse? Most definitely. And because of that, led me end this list with a playlist of Black country artists you should definitely listen to.
In The Loop 