The Country Music Establishment Could No Longer Dismiss Black and Latine Voices in 2024
From Shaboozey and Beyoncé to Carín León and Grupo Frontera, country has never sounded—or looked—more like America itself.
This February, when Mexican superstar Carín León made his debut at Nashville country institution the Grand Ole Opry, playing norteño to a crowd of mostly Latine fans, the performance was received as a sign of things to come. “Carín León is bringing música Méxicana and country music ever closer,” declared the New York Times. Edgar Barrera, a singularly prolific Latine pop songwriter and producer, observed that so-called “regional Mexican” music, just like American country music, “has always been looked down on. It’s seen as very rural.”
Banda is a Mexican musical style that dates to the mid-19th century, known for its tubas and grito hollers; the grito also proliferates in ranchera, a more romantic genre of rural Mexico. The fact that banda, ranchera, and their many offshoots—the accordion-propelled norteño; the storytelling-driven corrido—are analogous to U.S. country music was finally coming into view. Mexico is filled with cattle ranches, and it was the vaqueros of its land that begat cowboying and rodeos in the United States. The rise of groups like Texas’ Grupo Frontera and California’s Fuerza Regida, two massive acts who just released a collaborative album full of rambling guitars and yearning vocals, further demonstrates that the common roots between these styles is increasingly difficult to ignore.
Meanwhile, country by Black performers, who have been historically marginalized by the industry despite a century’s worth of contributions from musicians like DeFord Bailey, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, and Jessie Mae Hemphill, dominated the conversation as well as the charts in 2024. Shaboozey’s J-Kwon-inspired “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” was one of the longest-running Billboard top 10 hits of all time—tied with Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which may say something about the desire for country music from traditions outside the Nashville establishment’s narrow view. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was practically a dissertation on Black country, honoring the South Carolina pioneer Linda Martell, linking Tina Turner’s rock to her Tennessee roots, and featuring the celebrated songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens alongside lesser-known Black country musicians like Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy and—a few months before his own pop breakout—Shaboozey. All benefited from the broader exposure, including Adell, whose 2023 album Buckle Bunny commanded increasingly fervid fans, and Kennedy, whose album Rooted offers a modern combination of R&B and country.
Still, upon Cowboy Carter’s release, Beyoncé took pains to note that it is not a country album, and it was genre-agnostic enough to justify her hedging. But that statement in itself felt like a rebuttal to the establishment and its prejudices: Beyoncé, the album reminds us, is country to the core; if Nashville wouldn’t accept her, maybe it was the establishment whose credentials were lacking.
During Beyoncé’s explosive halftime performance at a Houston Texans game this Christmas, she performed alongside many of Cowboy Carter’s collaborators—Kennedy, Adell, Reyna Roberts, Brittney Spencer, Shaboozey, and Post Malone. She rode into the Texans’ stadium atop an impossibly silvery horse, wore rodeo chaps, and boot-scootin’-boogied in a line dance with her daughter Blue Ivy, putting an even finer point on the fact that she, too, comes from country tradition. And with her couture rodeo-queen outfits and unbridled outlaw sexuality, her visual presence this year challenged some of country’s Christian-coded tradwife aesthetics: the antithesis of, say, Gwen Stefani’s country-inspired Bouquets, which had her centering her husband’s approval even before she started shilling a prayer app on Instagram.
There have been a few crossovers before Lil Nas X and Shaboozey: Nelly’s hit collaborations with Tim McGraw and Florida Georgia Line; the Big & Rich-affiliated rapper/singer Cowboy Troy, whose rip-rocking banjo and Texas raps found a niche on the country charts in the mid-2000s. And the not-so-rigid lines between hip-hop and country were blurred even further this year. Post Malone, the white Texan who came up on singsongy rap, did a careerist code-switch with a collaboration-heavy country album. F-1 Trillion debuted at No. 1, even if some parts sounded like cosplay—in part thanks to “I Had Some Help,” a duet with Morgan Wallen, a country star wresting hip-hop for his own ends, who somehow got even more popular after being filmed using the n-word.
Jelly Roll—himself an avatar of a certain kind of disaffected, formerly addicted, impoverished Southerner—transmogrified his cadences as a one-time Three 6 Mafia-affiliated rapper to become one of the most deservedly heralded country singers of the era. This year, he topped the charts for the first time with Beautifully Broken, his emotionally raw 10th album. The popularity of his devastating depression ballad “I Am Not Okay” seemed to intimate how fucked up this whole country may actually be. But there was time for fun, too, on his collaboration with Jessie Murph, an appealingly crackle-twanged white girl from Alabama who raps when she feels like it on her debut album, That Ain’t No Man That’s the Devil.
Five years after the explosion of “Old Town Road,” country radio seemed more open to accepting a Black artist on its playlists in 2024. That viral hit was seemingly punished on the country charts for not fitting into an unspoken rubric of how country should sound, not to mention Lil Nas X’s queer, hip-hop Blackness and relative obscurity in Nashville. (In 2019, one former label executive opined to the New York Times, “They said there were compositional problems, because they didn’t know how to justify it any other way without sounding completely racist.”) The success of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song,” which pushed out the former at No. 1 on the country charts, makes it obvious how much Lil Nas X changed the conversation. Nashville’s undertone of racism, though, remains; the most shameful example of this came during the Country Music Awards in November, when presenters Peyton Manning and Luke Bryan reduced Shaboozey’s name into a running joke. (Shaboozey is the son of Nigerian immigrants; his stage name is a play on his given name, Collins Obinna Chibueze).
Still, the universal success of Shaboozey—and Lil Nas X, for that matter—underscores that musicians making country don’t necessarily need the country establishment to find an audience and acclaim. Perhaps that was Beyoncé’s point, too, when she emphasized that Cowboy Carter was not a country album, but a Beyoncé album. She sure got plenty of folks wearing bedazzled cowboy hats and silver cowboy boots anyway, a nationwide manifestation of what the culture critic Bree Malandro termed the “Yeehaw Agenda” in 2018. Despite whatever racist roadblocks Shaboozey may have encountered along the way, he did, in the end, get country radio’s support. But the previous successes of Beyoncé and Lil Nas X demonstrate that musicians making country music don’t necessarily need the establishment to find commercial and critical success.
At the CMAs, Beyoncé was snubbed entirely. Shaboozey was nominated for two awards, including Single of the Year, which he lost to Chris Stapleton’s Bon Jovi-esque power ballad “White Horse.” He lost the Best New Artist award to a UGA Kappa Delt named Megan Moroney, whose biggest songs were about the sin of rooting for Tennessee college football for her man, and about being a too-hot ex-girlfriend, the latter a kind of companion piece to Sabrina Carpenter’s own country-tinged “Taste.” (Moroney’s former paramour is... Morgan Wallen.) Even if Shaboozey did get a warm welcome on country radio, industry awards-show judges evidently preferred more familiar voices.
It’s interesting to consider what country music’s boom means for a country at a crossroads: that a working-class genre is rising up during the era of the most extreme income inequality in history, that the “traditional values” of the country music establishment are being upended by subtly daring people of color, that these closed doors are opening as the American population becomes more diverse. (Per the U.S. census, non-Hispanic whites are expected to comprise less than 50 percent of the population by 2042.)
I think a lot about growing up in Wyoming in the 1990s, surrounded by wasted jocks and cowpokes and howling Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places.” Back then I never felt like country music was for me, even with a staunch upbringing in mariachis and Barbara Mandrell and Crystal Gayle. The conservative culture that imbibed most country music like Coors Light didn’t seem to have a lot of room for a working-class Chicana feminist like me.
But country music’s ties to ranchera, norteño, banda, and other genres of música Méxicana dates back to Western Swing, which mined elements from these traditions in a cross-cultural conversation dating back to the early 20th century. The Mexican singer Vicente Fernández, whose longing ranchera earned him the moniker El Rey, was a god to no less a country king than George Strait. (Strait was studying Fernández while Mexican pop behemoth Juan Gabriel and Mexican-Texan country star Rick Treviño were both making honky-tonk.) The cross-border exchange goes to the music’s very thread: Many of the most iconic Nudie suits were designed by the Mexican tailor Manuel Cuevas, which is why they look like mariachi costumes.
And while the country establishment slowly, and perhaps reluctantly, learns to make space for those who don’t necessarily fit into its precepts—this year, these shifts in genre project what I see as a foundational patriotic value: (This) country is for everyone.
