Color Me Country

The grandbaby of a moonshine man
Gadsden, Alabama
Got folk down in Galveston, rooted in Louisiana
Used to say I spoke too country
And the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough
Said I wouldn’t saddle up, but
If that ain’t country, tell me what is?

—Beyoncé, “Ameriican Requiem”

I was raised in Apopka, Florida, a small city outside Orlando that is primarily known as the “indoor foliage capital of the world.” Flora might be Apopka’s claim to fame, but much can be said about its musical affinity: the country music hall of famer John David Anderson was born in Apopka; Jerome Eugene Lawson, lead singer of the a cappella group the Persuasions, was raised in Apopka; the country band Sawyer Brown was founded in Apopka; and Journey’s Jonathan Cain retired to Apopka. When I was coming of age in the city, in the 1990s, many of my friends were fans of country. I retain a soft spot for the country sounds of my youth and can two-step to a good beat across genres; after I heard the bass drop on Lil Nas X’s country trap song “Old Town Road” in December 2018, I pressed repeat well into the next year. The hit was shortly after pulled from Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart because, according to the magazine, it did not “embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” 

Two years earlier, the Recording Academy had rejected Beyoncé’s ballad “Daddy Lessons” from the Grammy’s country category, even though the song opens with soul-clapping, a “Yee-haa,” and praise to the singer’s home state of Texas, features twangy vocals, and, like Sawyer Brown’s ballad “The Walk,” eulogizes a father using Southern imagery and motifs. These patterns of exclusion date back decades. Despite the achievements of the likes of Etta Baker, Linda Martell, and O. B. McClinton, only three Black artists have been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in the museum’s sixty-year history: Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and DeFord Bailey. Charles, the most recent Black honoree, was inducted in 2021. Pride, one of country’s most revered performers of the Seventies, was the first, and that didn’t happen until 2000. Bailey’s career took off in the 1920s, but he was only posthumously inducted in 2005, after Nashville Public Television aired its documentary DeFord Bailey: A Legend Lost. Such disregard has underplayed if not erased Black contributions to country. As the scholar Diane Pecknold explains in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, the genre’s creation myth omits Black involvement and fabricates the role of race in its development. It is the same mythology that shapes our country: a whitewashed, white-centered version of history.¹

In the 1920s, the historian Charles L. Hughes notes in his book Country Soul, music executives marketed the earliest iteration of country as “hillbilly” or “old time” music, while music by Black artists was billed as “race music.”² Forty years later, he argues, politicians, journalists, and scholars adopted the genre, by now called “country,” as a soundtrack for disillusioned whites—mostly working-class southerners—in response to the racial justice progress made during the civil rights era. By the end of that era, “country music” would be unofficially deemed for whites only: the industry largely blackballed Black artists. (Linda Martell, for one example.) 

Quoting the scholar Geoff Mann, Pecknold writes that country music has an obligation to whiteness because “its nostalgia proposes ‘a cultural politics of time’ that suppresses specific histories of racism and domination. The result is a pose of ‘dehistoricized innocence’ and ‘naïve victimhood’ that allows whites to lament their own loss of privilege without acknowledging ever having held it.” Johnny Rebel’s 1960s singles “Stay Away from Dixie” and “Move Them Niggers North” are early entries in such nostalgia. More recently, Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which topped the Billboard charts in 2023, is an ode to it: 

Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out
I recommend you don’t. 

Conjuring the good ol’ days with the “good ol’ boys raised up right” in the good ol’ south, the song implies that social justice movements were the trouble with big cities. The music video made the notion explicit, juxtaposing footage of the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd with clips of Aldean and company in front of the Tennessee courthouse where Henry Choate, a Black teen accused of assaulting a white girl, was lynched in 1927. (The girl’s mother reportedly pleaded with the white mob not to kill him.) If country music ceased being white, where would these men live out their tough-guy fantasies?

Country music by Black artists obviously exists, and has ever since the genre’s beginnings, but one is usually hard pressed to hear Black country songs on the radio or see Black country acts on television. Hence the elation when, in February, Beyoncé released two tracks from her then-forthcoming country album, Act II: Cowboy Carter: “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” As soon as the singles dropped, fans began requesting them on the radio and, most stations obliged. KYKC, a country station in Ada, Oklahoma, initially refused to play “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which features Rhiannon Giddens, founding member of the Americana band Carolina Chocolate Drops, on banjo. “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC, as we are a country music station,” the manager emailed a listener who asked for the song. After deserved backlash, however, the station added it to its playlist. 

The song’s reception wasn’t anything new. Tanner Davenport, who codirects the Black Opry, a membership organization of Black country artists, fans, and industry professionals, recently wrote about being at the Country Music Association Awards (CMAs) eight years ago when Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks. He remembers a woman yelling, “Get that Black bitch off the stage!” Beyoncé likely locked eyes with the woman as well as other audience members who shared her conviction. The New York Times reported that some viewers posted comments both subtly and openly racist on Facebook about her inclusion on the program. One insisted that she “isn’t even what country represents,” contesting the singer rather than the (decidedly country) song. Citing her CMAs appearance on Instagram ten days before Cowboy Carter debuted this past March, Beyoncé posted: “This album has been over five years in the making. It was 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.” She went on to clarify, “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”

Seen as the second entry in a genre-crossing trilogy, following the house-inspired Renaissance, Act II: Cowboy Carter is a convergence of influences with Americana flair—a melting pot of southern music, the mashup of folk, blues, bluegrass, gospel and Appalachian traditions that anticipated today’s country songs. I admire the singer’s bold statement of ownership, but anyone with half an ear can hear that Cowboy Carter is both country and Beyoncé. The genres aren’t mutually exclusive, nor should they be. Martell, the first Black woman to grace the Opry stage, makes a few speaking cameos, thinking through the limitations of genre distinctions, as on “Spaghettii”: “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” On an interlude called “The Linda Martell Show,” she discloses, “This particular tune stretches across a range of genres and that’s what makes it a unique listening experience.” 

Beyoncé channels Tina Turner’s grit and rasp in “Ameriican Requiem” and “Ya Ya.” The latter samples Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” reimaging their lyrics to reflect on American ancestry. (She remixed the song to introduce Team USA for the Paris Olympics.) For “Bodyguard,” she pairs seductive vocals à la Vanity 6 with mellow instrumentals that recall Fleetwood Mac. “Daughter,” to my ear, both draws from the operatic aria and owes loosely to “When Doves Cry,” the funky 1984 single by the artist formerly known as Prince, and the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” And “Spaghettii” is as cold-blooded a diss track as they come, ironically alluding to the subgenre of Western films famous for their “inauthenticity”—preemptively cutting her critics off at the pass. This isn’t only a country album—it is an album of the country, affirming the diversity the US seems to at once brandish and take for granted.

Of the album’s more than two dozen tracks, there’s only one that I can take or leave: “Jolene.” Dolly Parton’s classic is a fragile song—sung by a woman on the brink of tears with a voice on the verge of breaking. Beyoncé’s inventive rendition lacks the diffidence “Jolene” requires, which says more about the original’s inimitability than it does about Beyoncé’s indisputable talent. (Miley Cyrus, who features on the duet “II Most Wanted,” covered “Jolene” in 2012, 2019, and 2022 with similar results.)

For over five years, I’ve been at work on Country Music, a poetry collection exploring the origins of the country genre as well as what it means for me, a Black woman, to consider myself a countryman. Before the release of Cowboy Carter appeared, my research led me to the up-and-coming Black country star Brittney Spencer. During a recent lecture about my work-in-progress, I asked the audience to close their eyes while I played the music video for her song “I Got Time.” 

It sounds like country—reminiscent of Parton’s “9 to 5.” I paused the video a little over a minute in and asked the audience to open their eyes. What we see is Spencer, her mouth open mid-lyric, kneeling in the center of a semicircle comprised almost entirely of people of color. (The one white-presenting man in the scene is obscured behind her.) This frame is what both country music and this country fears most: that a representation of the United States of America doesn’t have to include white people. 

The cover of Cowboy Carter shows Beyoncé sitting sideways on a white horse, wearing her country’s colors, her right hand holding the reins and her left the American flag. Like the cover, the album, the middle child in Beyoncé’s triptych, isn’t interested in replacement theories. Nor is it concerned with dated ideas about country music. Featuring Black country artists on “Blackbiird,” “Sweet Honey Buckiin,” “Just for Fun,” and other tracks, it deftly demonstrates that, as Charley Pride reckoned, “there’s enough room in country music for everybody.”