Country music’s popularity is at an all-time high in America, with the genre boasting a more diverse audience than ever before. Yet despite its diverse listeners, the marginalization of Black performers has been and remains an institutional part of the business. In it's early decades, artists of color in the Nashville-centered music were largely (and legally) excluded from popular venues and circuits, and labels divided their releases into records for white audiences and “race records” for nonwhites. And while the laws have since changed, the institution feels stagnant.
Recently, however, Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart was topped by an artist that might've come as a surprise to some: Beyoncé. Released in March 2024, Queen Bey’s Cowboy Carter is, through and through, a country album, heavily influenced by the country and zydeco music she heard while growing up in Houston and while attending rodeos with her grandfather. But like her first country song, “Daddy Lessons,” from 2016’s Lemonade, Cowboy Carter has stirred up conversations about not just Beyoncé's place, but many Black artists’ place in the predominantly white world of country music—and their role in the genre’s history.
No matter what the common opinion might have you believe, the facts are, Black musicians have played an important part in the evolution of the genre at nearly every stage of its development. Like rock, jazz and, yes pop too, every facet of country music—from its instrumentation to vocal and instrumental techniques—is indebted to Black people.
Jiffy Cornbread, Booty Cornfed.
The Black influence on country music starts with the banjo, an instrument that often conjures the hazy image of a white pastoral South. But the instrument is actually a descendant of West African lutes, made from gourds, that were brought to America by, well, slaves and which became a central part of slave music and culture in the American South.
Soon, the instrument was standardized, appropriated and spread to white audiences through minstrel and blackface shows—which deeply informed the rise of "hillbilly music", a term that would later be rebranded to “country music”. (The blackface performer Emmett Miller’s “Lovesick Blues,” for example, inspired Hank Williams’ own rendition of the song, which is, unfortunately still one of the most beloved songs in country history.)
White banjo players like Earl Scruggs and David Akeman later made the instrument integral to the genre’s DNA, so Black musicians decided to abandoned it.
Many of the songs that early "hillbilly" artists played were likewise inherited and adapted from black sources—like slave spirituals, field songs, religious hymns and even lifted directly from the works of professional black songwriters. “When the World is On Fire,” for example, a hymn originally arranged by a black minister, was turned into the Carter Family’s 1928 hit “Little Darling, Pal of Mine”—which was then turned into Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” Meanwhile, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was originally written by James A. Bland, a Black New Yorker who would hardly have found himself welcome in the parts of Virginia he sang about when, in 1940, it was named the official state song.
What's interesting to note is while the South remained deeply segregated in the 1920's and 1930's, black and white musicians frequently collabed, even appearing on many recordings together.
In his 2013 essay “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records”, Patrick Huber details the startling diversity of country music, which featured a higher frequency of integrated sessions than any other genre. Nearly 50 Black singers and musicians, he writes, appeared on commercial country records between 1924 and 1932. He states, "because the music was not a white agrarian tradition, but a fluid phenomenon passed back and forth between the races." But as country music became less a hobby and more a commercial product, record labels began dividing their releases into “hillbilly records” and “race records,” under the presumption that consumers bought music according to their race.
Many of the black performers on "hillbilly records" went uncredited and were even scrubbed from marketing images in favor of white stand-ins. And the genre was quickly positioned as an authentic—sorry "authentic"—return to the music of the idyllic rural white American South, and in direct opposition to Black music.
This marketing ploy worked, in that it successfully pushed Black artists to the margins of country music. And no matter how influential Black musicians were behind the scenes, in the margins they would remain.
I’m a Stallion Runnin’, No Candle in the Wind.
It’s a subject Beyoncé delves into head on with the release of her eighth studio album, Cowboy Carter, which pays tribute to some of those very trailblazing Black artists who have helped shape country music (without credit). Among them: Linda Martell, the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry; author, educator, and award-winning songwriter Alice Randall; and singer and pianist Frankie Staton, who created the first Black Country Music Showcase at the Bluebird Cafe, a famed Nashville listening room. Cowboy Carter also serves as a showcase for important contemporary talent, including Rhiannon Giddens, who plays banjo on lead single “Texas Hold ’Em,” and Brittney Spencer, who sings on “Blackbiird,” Beyoncé’s version of the classic Beatles cut, alongside Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts.
“Texas Hold ‘Em,” in particular, begins with a familiar yet unique syncopated banjo lick, an appropriate and deliberate intro, as no other instrument more clearly winks at the history and influence Black Americans have had on the genre quite like the banjo.
The Legacy is the Last Thing I Do.
Whether or not Beyoncé should be nominated for a Country Music Association Award has been much a subject of ire among country music fans and Beyoncé fans alike, and harkens back to a contentious debate that raged over whether Lil Nas X, whose single “Old Town Road” spent a record 19 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 2019, is a country artist.
And despite having the biggest new country album of the year, Beyoncé received the same indignation, being completely shut-out from the 2024 Country Music Awards. Cowboy Carter topped the country charts—a historic first for a Black woman singing country—and spent 22 weeks on the Billboard top 200 album ranking. Yet despite the CMA's giving nominations to other pop crossover artists, including Post Malone and Shaboozey, the voting body denied Cowboy Carter nominations in any category.
Since the nominations were announced, people have back flipped and hand sprung through hoops in an attempt to make logistical arguments behind the industry’s snub of Beyoncé (that may or may not have anything to do with identity). But what they neglect to acknowledge is that the CMA's have had a noticeable pattern of erasing and sidelining Black artists, specifically Black women, even in their own art.
And Beyoncé seems actively aware of this gatekeeping as Cowboy Carter is built on the contributions of the centuries of Black artists that came before her. It’s hardly any wonder she distanced herself and her album from the country establishment from the start as she likely knew well before any of us that the CMA's were never going to let her in the door.
Even still, it’s interesting—if a little bittersweet—to imagine what a Cowboy Carter CMA nomination would’ve looked like for Beyoncé and country music as a whole. In that reality, would Beyoncé have succeeded in her quest for legitimacy? Would a nomination have granted her a seat at the country turned cunty table? With that seat, would she have saved an extra one for the Black women after her? For Tanner Adell, for Brittney Spencer, for Tiera Kennedy, for Reyna Roberts and so on and so on. Maybe.
But also, maybe it doesn’t matter, especially not at the time you're reading this, when the show has likely already aired, awards have already been handed out, and celebrations have already been had. Because whether country music grants Black artists—Black women—legitimacy or not, Black women will continue on, and thrive in the genre, without it.
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