Beyoncé made history Sunday night (Feb. 2) when Cowboy Carter won the Grammy for best country album, making the superstar the first Black artist to win in the category since it was reintroduced in 1995, after a nearly three-decade absence.
Earlier in the evening, she also captured the award for best country duo/group performance for “II Most Wanted” with Miley Cyrus, which was the first time a Black lead artist had won that award since The Pointer Sisters in 1975. Bey capped the evening by winning the night’s biggest prize, album of the year, an honor that had previously eluded her during her 25-year career as a member of Destiny’s Child and a solo artist, despite winning more Grammys than anyone in history.
Many in the country music community are applauding Beyoncé’s country wins and hope they will help lift up other Black artists in country music today, many of whom have been unable to get a foothold on radio or gain much traction within the genre.
Beyoncé’s wins for best country album and album of the year are overall wins for country music, says Big Machine Label Group founder/president/CEO Scott Borchetta. “Beyoncé made a brilliant album that was absolutely worthy of album of the year,” he says. “Every event and moment like this is a move forward and continues to widen the aperture and acceptance of what country music is and can be.”
Willie “Prophet” Stiggers, co-founder of the Black Music Action Coalition, agrees, telling Billboard: “Cowboy Carter pushed country music’s genre redlining into the public zeitgeist – but as Beyoncé herself has mentioned, Black artists and writers have been pushing against Music Row’s gates for decades. Cowboy Carter is such a powerful body of work that it finally broke some long-held barriers. [Recording Academy CEO] Harvey Mason jr. and the academy also deserve acknowledgement for working intentionally to foster a younger, more diverse voting membership, which helped to bring some of those barriers down. However, it’s important that the industry – and Music Row specifically – understand that this moment, this album, is a beginning, not a destination. … ‘Genre’ is still too often used as coded language for race, and it’s far past time for that to change.”
Others see Beyoncé’s win as an isolated victory. “I love that Beyoncé won for best country album and [album of the year] for Cowboy Carter last night at the Grammys, but it’s a win for Beyonce, not necessarily for Black artists in country music,” says Cameo Carlson, CEO of artist development/management services company Mtheory and manager of Black country singer Mickey Guyton, who received three Grammy nominations at the 2022 Grammy Awards but took home none.
“The fact that Beyonce’s album wasn’t even nominated for other Nashville or country-centric awards, like the CMA Awards, is indicative of the work that still needs to be done in Nashville and in country music,” Carlson continues. “The Grammys are a global award for all intents and purpose; the hardcore country awards — and the large body of people that make up the voting bloc for those awards — did not embrace Beyonce or Cowboy Carter, decrying [the album] as ‘not really country’ or making the excuse that she didn’t ‘play the Nashville game’ by coming and investing time in the country music community or in Nashville.”
Beyonce had already rewritten the country rulebook with the album before her Grammy victories. Following its March 29, 2024, release, Cowboy Carter debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, making her the first Black woman to reach the pinnacle, dating back to the chart’s January 1964 inception. She also became the first Black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart with “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which stayed at the top for 10 weeks. However, the song peaked at No. 33 on the Country Airplay chart.
While, as Carlson mentions, there had been much talk about the Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter not receiving a CMA Award nomination for album of the year (or any CMA Award nominations), such an occurrence is hardly rare. There have been more than a dozen records that have won the Grammy for best country album since the Recording Academy brought the category back in 1995 that did not receive a CMA nomination for album of the year, much less a win, including Shania Twain’s The Woman in Me (1996), the then-named Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces (1999) and Tanya Tucker’s While I’m Living (2020). The Grammy voters tend to nominate a wider variety of albums, often including legends who no longer receive commercial airplay, artists who belong to the broader country genre but aren’t in the mainstream, or artists who don’t necessarily, as Carlson said, “play the game.” (In addition to Cowboy Carter, the only country album to win the all-genre Grammy for album of the year and not receive a CMA nomination is The Chicks’ Taking the Long Way in 2006, which came out after much of the country community disavowed the trio for comments Natalie Maines made about then-President George Bush.)
The CMA declined to comment for this story.
Scott Stem, manager for Scotty McCreery at Triple 8 Management, doesn’t see the disparity as a bad thing. “I don’t think all the awards have to be the same — one artist can win the Grammy, one artist can win the CMA Award, one artist can win the ACM Award, and one artist can win the American Music Award,” he says. “It only widens the pot if more artists and their work are recognized instead of it being the same artists on each show.”
Unlike the CMA and ACM Awards, which draw from primarily the country community and may include industry members not involved in the creative process such as radio executives as voters, the 13,000 Grammy voters come from all genres and must be involved in the creative music-making process. Grammy voters are allowed to vote in up to 10 categories across three fields in addition to the General Field categories, meaning that non-country voters could choose to vote in the country field in order to support Beyoncé. Beyoncé won none of the other Grammys she was nominated for in such genre fields as pop, rap or Americana, possibly indicating that non-country voters were inclined to vote for her in country but not spend their limited votes for her in other areas.
Not everyone felt the win was deserved, with some questioning whether the album belonged in the country category at all after Beyoncé herself said in March, “This ain’t a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album.” But there was no denying its homage to country’s Black roots with the inclusion of Black country pioneer Linda Martell and country’s history with the participation of Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, as well as a nod to its future by including rising Black country artists like Shaboozey, Willie Jones, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts.
Big & Rich’s John Rich posited in a post on X that her win was a result of Sony Music swaying the vote, instead of merit. “Folks are asking me ‘how do music award shows work?’” Rich wrote. “Labels/publishers all have blocks of votes. They make deals with each other ‘you vote for mine, we’ll vote for yours’ type thing. It has ZERO to do with who made the best music, thus, Beyonce with ‘Country album of the year.’ Nice, right? The same thing is true with the CMA’s, ACM’s, Billboard, etc…all work exactly the same. Last night, the Grammy’s [sic] outed themselves in a big way.” [Editor’s note: The Billboard Music Awards are determined solely by Billboard chart performance, not a voting body.]
As the current presidential administration erases diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, many of which came to be following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, some hope Beyoncé’s win will show Nashville that listeners want to hear from more than the white men who dominate country music, especially mainstream country radio.
“Beyoncé will move on and make another killer Beyoncé record in any genre she wants to, while Black and non-white country artists will continue to struggle to be heard and supported,” Carlson says. “Labels and the country infrastructure need to continue to invest in these artists, need to continue to invest in DEI programs, and support programs like Equal Access that are out here doing the work every day to make sure that Beyoncé is only the first Black artist to win a country album of the year Grammy, but certainly not the last.”
Beverly Keel, dean of Middle Tennessee State University’s College of Media and Entertainment, says all eyes will now be on the May 8 ACM Awards, for which first-round voting started Feb. 1 and ends Feb. 18. “I hope Nashville will now fully embrace the project,” Keel says. “This international superstar is taking her wonderful representation of country music around the world, introducing it to people who haven’t listened to the genre before. I hope the next Black female artist doesn’t have to be as successful as Beyoncé to have a big country album. I hope this is the beginning and not an anomaly.”
—Assistance on this story provided by Jessica Nicholson
