If you’ve attended a mainstream country concert in the past decade, you’re probably familiar with the part of the set where the headliner sprinkles in a non-obvious cover from an adjacent genre like pop, R&B, or classic rock. It’s a move with any number of purposes: to show an artist’s range of influences, to reel in a drifting crowd with a massive hit, to appeal to a wider audience, or to highlight how fluid and arbitrary genre borders really are when you strip a song back to its essentials. Go to more than a handful of country shows, and you’ll start to notice some repetition: songs by Tom Petty, Adele, even Jimmy Eat World.
But apart from heartland rockers like Petty and John Mellencamp, few artists have been covered more widely and regularly in a country setting over the past decade than Beyoncé, whose new songs “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” have sparked a week of conversations about the sonic and racial policing of genre in country music.
What do Maren Morris, Reba McEntire, Sam Hunt, the Chicks, Dustin Lynch, Lauren Alaina, Mickey Guyton, Kelsea Ballerini, Brett Young, Lady A, Tyler Rich, Maddie & Tae, and Courtney Cole all have in common? They’ve all covered Beyoncé live within the past 10 years for a country music audience.
When a 17-year-old Nashville upstart named Taylor Swift spent the summer of 2007 touring high schools, casinos, and county fairs, she included two covers in her set: the first was “Missing You,” the 1984 soft-rock hit by John Waite.
The other was “Irreplaceable.”
Swift was only hearing what was already in the song: Ne-Yo conceived it as a country tune. “I was thinking about Shania Twain and Faith Hill when I wrote that song,” he once said. A few months after Swift stopped covering it, Beyoncé herself showed up to the American Music Awards to perform a country version with Sugarland, complete with accordion and mandolin.
But Beyoncé country covers are not limited to just one song, or even an era. “Halo,” “Crazy in Love,” “If I Were Boy,” “Single Ladies,” “Love on Top,” and “Say My Name” have all received the countrified treatment in recent years. That Beyoncé’s catalog has been so readily adaptable to these country arrangements says less about the community of country stars presenting those songs to their country fan base and more about the structure of the songs themselves.
Have country singers also been weird about Beyoncé during that same time? They sure have. Mostly they’ve been fawning, fanning out from afar about what it’s like to take a shot with her or expressing amazement or admiration at how she does what does. When old-heads like Travis Tritt and Alan Jackson made a stink about Beyoncé’s 2016 CMA performance with the Chicks, stars like Kenny Chesney and Blake Shelton rushed to her defense.
But country singers have also talked about Beyoncé with veiled language of race and musical segregation that harkens back to country star Webb Pierce telling Charley Pride it was good to have the Black country star “in our music.”
“She has a little country-soul,” said a teenaged Scotty McCreery back in 2011, “probably a little more soul.”
The racial and gender politics of Luke Bryan’s public relationship to the singer’s music, alone, are thorny enough for an American Studies dissertation: There’s the jokey video of him dancing to “Single Ladies” in a leotard interspersed with country stars expressing disgust; there’s him and Florida Georgia Line re-creating the infamous elevator incident for cornpone laughs; there’s Bryan telling his crowds to shake it “just like Beyoncé” onstage each night while performing “Country Girl (Shake It for Me).”
Country music artists have been happy to adapt Beyoncé’s songbook for their white audiences, emblematic of a larger trend, as the writer Andrea Williams has pointed out, of an industry where Black sounds, styles, and sonic innovations are subsumed and then regurgitated through a prism of whiteness for the genre’s perceived fanbase.
“For all the acknowledgement of the Black musical tradition that rests at the foundation of the country genre,” Williams wrote in a column this week, “or even the obvious reliance on hip hop, R&B and other Black stylings in modern country, Black people are largely shut out of country music’s creation.”
Six years before Beyoncé’s presence at the CMA’s caused controversy, McEntire performed “If I Were a Boy” on the same CMA stage to a standing ovation.
It remains to be seen how the country music industry reacts to Beyoncé’s foray into roots and country music. But what’s clear is that over the past decade, many of country music’s biggest stars have been eager to claim her music in a country context.