Can Beyoncé save country music's reputation?

When Beyoncé became the first black woman to top the Billboard Hot Country chart, it was hailed as a breakthrough moment for country music.

"Texas Hold 'Em", one of two new songs released by the Houston-born singer in a Super Bowl commercial as part of her upcoming album "Renaissance: Act II", is "not her first rodeo", so to speak, said Glamour, having previously elicited a "swift – and explicitly racist – backlash" for her 2016 performance of "Daddy Lessons" with The Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Academy (CMA) awards.

It is, however, her "most successful and controversial" foray into the genre, William Nash, Professor of American Studies and English and American Literatures, Middlebury College, Vermont, wrote on The Conversation.

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Many "stereotype country music as being white, politically conservative, militantly patriotic and rural", said Nash. "But the story of country has always been more complicated, and debates about race and authenticity in country are nothing new; they've plagued country artists, record companies and listeners for over a century."

'No Beyoncé on a country music station'

While some country singers – such as the legendary Dolly Parton – have been "willing to welcome Beyoncé with open arms, that isn't necessarily true of the country establishment as a whole", said Mary Kate Carr for AV Club.

"The fact that she's the first woman to accomplish these chart records is demonstrative of not just the way country music as a whole has been siloed from pop music, but of the way that Black artists, and particularly Black female artists, have struggled for acceptance in the genre," Carr added.

By studying over 11,000 songs played on country radio from 2002 to 2020, Jada Watson, an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa and the principal investigator of SongData, found that artists of colour represented just 3% of country airplay, two-thirds of which were by solo male artists.

The case of one radio station in Oklahoma, which responded to a fan request to play "Texas Hold 'Em" with the message: "We do not play Beyoncé on KYKC as we are a country music station", received national attention as indicative of the prejudices around the genre.

It "ignited a new flame in a long-simmering debate over how Black artists fit into a genre that has Black music at its roots", said The New York Times.

The backlash not only "set off a rapid chain of events" that eventually led to the song topping the country charts, reported NPR, but also "solidified a complaint against country radio stations in particular: that they act as gatekeepers of a stereotype that the genre is limited to white artists".

Breaking down country barriers

These reactions, "which range from simply ignorant to downright misogynoir, presuppose that commercial country music – a music of guitars, banjos and fiddles; of pick-up trucks, heartbreak and that down-home lonesome sound – is a legacy that belongs only to white, rural southerners", said two-time Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens in The Guardian. But "that supposition is just plain wrong".

"The truth is that country music has never been white," argued Taylor Crumpton in Time. "Country music is Black. Country music is Mexican. Country music is Indigenous", and Beyoncé does not need "white validation to classify her country –she has been country for the entirety of her life".

So far, there is "no indication the singles have challenged the system and its goal of targeting affluent white listeners", said NPR, even if it is clear that Beyoncé's foray into country music has helped "shed light on the presence of Black country artists".

But if anyone can break down the barriers in country, Dr Charles Hughes, the director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College, told The New York Times, it's Beyoncé and her legion of BeyHive fans.

"Maybe that power will create an expanded space for all these great Black women making country music," he said, "to make it more in line with the people who love country music and the country it's supposed to represent."