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<\/p>\nIf you\u2019ve attended a mainstream country concert in the past decade, you\u2019re probably familiar with the\u00a0part of the set\u00a0where the headliner sprinkles in a non-obvious cover from an adjacent genre like pop, R&B, or classic rock. It\u2019s a move with any number of purposes: to show an artist\u2019s 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\u2019ll start to notice some repetition: songs by\u00a0Tom Petty,\u00a0Adele, even Jimmy Eat World.<\/p>\n
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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\u00a0Beyonc\u00e9, whose\u00a0new songs \u201cTexas Hold \u2018Em\u201d and \u201c16 Carriages\u201d have sparked a week of conversations about the sonic and racial policing of genre in country music.<\/p>\n
What do\u00a0Maren Morris, Reba McEntire,\u00a0Sam Hunt, the Chicks, Dustin Lynch,\u00a0Lauren Alaina,\u00a0Mickey Guyton, Kelsea Ballerini, Brett Young, Lady A, Tyler Rich,\u00a0Maddie & Tae, and Courtney Cole all have in common? They\u2019ve all covered Beyonc\u00e9 live within the past 10 years for a country music audience.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cMissing You,\u201d the 1984 soft-rock hit by John Waite.<\/p>\n
The other was \u201cIrreplaceable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Swift was only hearing what was already in the song: Ne-Yo conceived it as a country tune. \u201cI was thinking about Shania Twain and Faith Hill when I wrote that song,\u201d he once\u00a0said. A few months after Swift stopped covering it, Beyonc\u00e9 herself showed up to the American Music Awards to perform a country version with Sugarland, complete with accordion and mandolin.<\/p>\n
But Beyonc\u00e9 country covers are not limited to just one song, or even an era. \u201cHalo,\u201d \u201cCrazy in Love,\u201d \u201cIf I Were Boy,\u201d \u201cSingle Ladies,\u201d \u201cLove on Top,\u201d and \u201cSay My Name\u201d have all received the countrified treatment in recent years. That Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Have country singers also been weird about Beyonc\u00e9 during that same time? They sure have. Mostly they\u2019ve been fawning, fanning out from afar about what it\u2019s like to take a\u00a0shot with her\u00a0or expressing\u00a0amazement\u00a0or\u00a0admiration\u00a0at how she does what does. When old-heads like Travis Tritt and Alan Jackson made a stink about Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s 2016 CMA performance with the Chicks, stars like Kenny Chesney and Blake Shelton rushed to her defense.<\/p>\n
But country singers have also talked about Beyonc\u00e9 with veiled language of race and musical segregation that harkens back to country star Webb Pierce\u00a0telling Charley Pride it was good to have the Black country star \u201cin our music.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe has a little country-soul,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0a teenaged Scotty McCreery back in 2011, \u201cprobably a little more soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
The racial and gender politics of Luke Bryan\u2019s public relationship to the singer\u2019s music, alone, are thorny enough for an American Studies dissertation: There\u2019s the jokey\u00a0video\u00a0of him dancing to \u201cSingle Ladies\u201d in a leotard interspersed with country stars expressing disgust; there\u2019s him and Florida Georgia Line\u00a0re-creating\u00a0the infamous elevator incident for cornpone laughs; there\u2019s Bryan telling his crowds to shake it\u00a0\u201cjust like Beyonc\u00e9\u201d\u00a0onstage each night while performing \u201cCountry Girl (Shake It for Me).\u201d<\/p>\n
Country music artists have been happy to adapt Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s 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\u2019s perceived fanbase.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor all the acknowledgement of the Black musical tradition that rests at the foundation of the country genre,\u201d Williams\u00a0wrote in a column this week, \u201cor 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\u2019s creation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Six years before Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s presence at the CMA\u2019s caused controversy, McEntire performed \u201cIf I Were a Boy\u201d on the same CMA stage to a standing ovation.<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen how the country music industry reacts to Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s foray into roots and country music. But what\u2019s clear is that over the past decade, many of country music\u2019s biggest stars have been eager to claim her music in a country context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019ve attended a mainstream country concert in the past decade, you\u2019re probably familiar with the\u00a0part of the set\u00a0where the headliner sprinkles in a non-obvious cover from… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23084,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n