Beyoncé’s Requiem for Black Country Dreams

With “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé is not only topping the country charts, but also challenging old narratives about genre.

Since Beyoncé announced on Super Bowl Sunday that she’d be releasing “,” the album now known as Cowboy Carter, conversations about the role of Black artists in mainstream country have exploded on social media, and in large media outlets such as , , , , and . In , musician and historian Rhiannon Giddens eloquently makes the case for the centrality of Black artists in country music, while also articulating the myths and slurs that have kept Black performers and fans on the margins.

“In this moment, after 100 years of erasure, false narratives, and racism built into the country industry, it’s important to shine a light on the Black co-creation of country music—and creation is the correct word, not influence,” Giddens writes. “Black musicians, along with their working-class white counterparts, were active participants and creators, not empty vessels with good rhythm.”

Sometimes these myths have been weaponized violently. Black country veterans, including , Charley Pride, and have shared their experiences performing in country music spaces, including the racial slurs and threats directed at them. For example, in his 1994 memoir, Pride writes about touring the U.S. South in the late 1960s, where some of the concert venues he played received bomb threats.

As both a Black fan and writer of country music criticism, I’ve thought twice about bringing my child to a country music festival or concert with me, out of fear she might witness or be the target of another fan’s violence. But while criticisms of Beyoncé have sometimes gotten ugly (’s dehumanizing comparison of Beyoncé to a dog peeing against a tree to mark her territory is one particularly vivid example), in the wake of Cowboy Carter, listeners who might not have heard their stories told in mainstream country music are into the genre.

Black country artists, including Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, Reyna Roberts, Willie Jones, Linda Martell, Brittney Spencer, and Shaboozey, who all appear on Cowboy Carter, have seen an uptick in and overall listenership on streaming services. Perhaps we could dub this the “Beyoncé Effect,” a wave that lifts all who surround her, but Beyoncé’s impact goes beyond opening the door wider for a handful of Black country artists.

Cowboy Carter also opens up conversations about Black creativity and imaginative freedom within country music and beyond, planting the seeds for deeper social change. On the album, Beyoncé cites and performs an expansive history of Black musical creativity, while also bringing her own unique energy and style. Throughout the album, Beyoncé channels Ray Charles’ showmanship and swinging reinterpretations that made his 1962 album, “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” a in the country genre.

You can especially hear her power to freshly reinterpret classics on her version of “Jolene.” We get the sunny optimism of Charley Pride’s “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” on “Bodyguard,” though it’s tweaked for modern times. (She even sings to her lover, “I could be your bodyguard/ Please let me be your Kevlar (Huh)/ Baby, let me be your lifeguard/ Would you let me ride shotgun?”) On “16 Carriages,” Beyoncé tells a story of lost innocence and sacrifice as a young performer, echoing themes present in Allison Russell’s “Night Flyer,” “Persephone,” and other songs about survival that appear on her 2021 album, “Outside Child.”

On her tender lullaby “Protector,” performed with her daughter Rumi, Beyoncé promises to nurture her daughter’s light: “Even though I know someday you’re gonna shine on your own/ I will be your projector.” I hear a resonance with Black country songwriter Alice Randall’s wonderful “My Dream,” performed by Valerie June and included on the 2024 album, “My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall.”

We get the muscular country rock spirit of Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” (especially of the song) on records like “Ya Ya” and “Texas Hold ‘Em.” (I can imagine these songs as production numbers in the style of Tina Turner and Beyoncé herself, seeing as Beyoncé performed “Proud Mary” with her icon at .)

And might Beyoncé’s flirty duet with Miley Cyrus, “II Most Wanted,” (“Making waves in the wind with my empty hand/ My other hand on you”) be the sequel (or prequel?) to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” a sapphic provocation from the shotgun seat, Luke Combs left behind in the dust? “II Most Wanted” is one of several songs on Cowboy Carter that speak to the centrality of stories of finding love and mobility in Black country, blues, and rhythm and blues music. Whether by horse, train, Cadillac, or Starship, Black music is shaped by stories of leaving, returning, and wandering to places known and unknown.

Beyoncé’s crossing and melding, hybridizing and swirling on this album, has everything to do with reclaiming, an artistic action denied just about any Black artist who wants to make it in country music. For earlier Black artists like Bobby Womack, Millie Jackson, and Joe Tex, there has often been a double standard to “stay in your lane,” while white artists have been free to experiment, as Charles L. Hughes makes clear in his 2015 book, .

Cowboy Carter is a provocation, a new chapter, a clapback. It is not so much a rejection of the past as much as a sometimes-neck-popping conversation with that past, and with that, a rethinking of it. As both an improviser and re-interpreter, Beyoncé carries forward the tradition of African American art-making that is deeply invested in the changing same, bringing new energy to past songs. This spirit of circularity, a key African American aesthetic is evoked in the very first lyrics of the album: “Nothing really ends/ For things to stay the same/ They have to change again.”

In that way, we might see her as continuing a legacy of Black innovation in country music, whether it’s because of the ill fit of the instruments she inherited, the countrypolitan storytelling of Linda Martell, or the sex-positive grooves of Millie Jackson and Tanner Adell.

Ultimately, there is a kind of recovery at the heart of this album—a healing of the spirit of Black innovation in a genre that has worked so hard to repress it: “Hello, my old friend/ You change your name but not the ways you play pretend,” Beyoncé sings in “American Requiem.” A requiem is normally a mass for the dead, a ritual of remembrance. In traditional white and western ways of thinking, the purpose of a requiem is to lay souls to rest. But on this album, the purpose is to raise the dead, to animate histories and memories once forgotten, or misnamed.

This is an album meant to lift the lid off of the coffin of music that has grown stagnant. Like the exorcism that it is, this process of challenging old narratives and animating lost stories can be risky, vulnerable work. But perhaps it is time to abandon the old “pretend” narratives of “three chords and the truth” to honor other stories, to conjure in order to set all of us free.

Francesca T. Royster is a professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago. Her books include Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts, (2013), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (2023).

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