Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Beyoncé · S9 E5
The Americana Question
What does it mean for a Black woman to claim the most racially coded genre in American music?
Nobody in Nashville wanted to answer the question: does a Black woman from Houston get to call herself country? Cowboy Carter answered without waiting for permission.
"A Bar Song (Tipsy)" official music video, Shaboozey (2024). The Cowboy Carter collaborator who went from album feature to the number-one song in America, proving Beyonce's thesis wasn't just talk.
A BAR SONG (TIPSY) by Shaboozey (2024)
Shaboozey appeared on Cowboy Carter's "SWEET HONEY BUCKIIN'" and performed alongside Beyonce at the NFL Christmas Halftime. Months later, "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" became the longest-running number-one single of 2024, spending nineteen weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. The song itself is deceptively simple: a country-folk groove built around the refrain of J-Kwon's 2004 hip-hop hit "Tipsy." That sample choice is the whole argument in miniature. Country and hip-hop sharing DNA, and the result topping every chart that exists.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did country radio actually respond to Cowboy Carter?
In 2019, which song was controversially removed from Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, sparking a genre debate that foreshadowed Cowboy Carter's reception?
The Bigger Picture
What Cowboy Carter proved isn't that Beyonce can make country music. It's that the categories themselves are the problem. When "TEXAS HOLD 'EM" topped both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs simultaneously, the charts became the argument: the same song, the same voice, belonging everywhere at once.
JOLENE
Beyonce reimagines Dolly Parton's 1973 classic with a complete power shift. Where Parton's original pleads with Jolene not to take her man, Beyonce's version turns the plea into a warning. The most famous country song, rewritten by the most powerful pop star, on an album that asks why those two categories ever existed separately.
The culture war around Cowboy Carter made the album impossible to ignore. Next: the Grammys, the records, and why the final verdict on Beyonce's country era belongs to history, not to Nashville.
0 XP earned this session