Is Beyoncé going to the country? Nashville stars have been singing her songs for a decade

If you have attended a mainstream country concert of the last decade, you're probably familiar with part of the set where the headliner sprinkles in an inconspicuous cover from an adjacent genre such as pop, R&B or classic rock. It's a move with multiple purposes: to show the range of an artist's influences, to pander to a drifting crowd with a smash hit, to appeal to a wider audience, or to highlight how fluid and arbitrary genre boundaries really are when you strip down a song back to its basics. 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 aside from heartthrob rockers like Petty and John Mellencamp, few artists have covered country more widely and regularly over the past decade than Beyoncé, whose new songs “Texas Hold'Em” and “16 Carriages” have sparked a week of discussions about the sonic and racial policing of genre in country music.

What to do Maren MorrisReba McEntire, Sam HuntThe Chicks, Dustin Lynch, Lauren Alaina, Mickey GuytonKelsea Ballerini, Brett Young, Lady A, Tyler Rich, Maddie & TaeAnd Courtney Cole have everything in common? They've all covered Beyoncé live in the last 10 years for a country music audience.

When a 17-year-old Nashville freshman 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 soft-rock hit from 1984 .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 he said. A few months after Swift stopped covering it, Beyoncé herself appeared at the American Music Awards to perform a country version with Sugarland, complete with accordion and mandolin.

But Beyoncé's country covers aren't limited to just one song, or even one era. 'Halo', 'Crazy in Love', 'If I Were Boy', 'Single Ladies', 'Love on Top' and 'Say My Name' have all received the unacceptable treatment in recent years. That Beyonce's catalog was so easily adaptable to these country covers says less about the community of country stars introducing these songs to their country fans and more about the structure of the songs themselves.

Were country singers also curious about Beyoncé at the same time? They certainly have. They mostly have fawns, fantasizing from afar about what it's like to get one shot with her or expressing surprise or admiration for how he does what he 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 jumped to her defense.

But country singers have also spoken about Beyoncé with veiled racial language and musical divisiveness reminiscent of country star Webb Pierce. effective Charley Pride was good to have the black country star “in our music.”

“It has a little country soul” he said a teenage Scotty McCreery in 2011, “probably a little more soul.”

The racial and gender politics of Luke Bryan's public relationship with the singer's music alone is thorny enough for an American Studies thesis: There's the jokey video of him dancing to “Single Ladies” with a string of country stars expressing disgust. it's him and the Florida Georgia Line recreating the infamous cornpone elevator incident; there's Bryan telling his crowds to shake it up “Like Beyoncé” on stage each night while performing “Country Girl (Shake It For Me).”

Country music artists happily adapted Beyoncé's song for their white audiences, emblematic of a larger trend, as writer Andrea Williams has pointed out, of an industry where Black sounds, styles and sonic innovations are subsumed and then rekindled through a prism. of whiteness for the genre's perceived fan base.

“Despite all the recognition of the Black musical tradition that underpins country music,” Williams He wrote in a column this week, “or even the apparent reliance on hip hop, R&B and other black styles in contemporary country, blacks are largely excluded from the making of country music.”

Six years before Beyoncé's appearance at the CMA's caused controversy, Reba performed “If I Were Boy” on the same CMA stage to a standing ovation.

It remains to be seen how the country music industry will react to Beyoncé's foray into roots and country music. But what is 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.