I wasn’t planning to take heed to Cowboy Carter, the eighth studio album from American singer and songwriter Beyoncé. I’ve all the time had a love for her music—but country has never been my thing.
Plans modified once I began to read what people were writing in regards to the record, from comments on social media to reviews in major publications. Their reactions were bitter, even cruel. “Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ isn’t a rustic album. It’s worse,” proclaimed one review in The Washington Post. “Beyoncé has chosen to do Dolly Parton karaoke,” writes the reviewer. “She seems like she’s doing Wild West bedroom cosplay in outer space.”
“The lefties within the entertainment industry just won’t leave any area alone, right?” asked an interviewer on a One America News program. “They’ve got to make their mark, identical to a dog in a dog walk park,” responded the interviewee.
It’s not that Cowboy Carter is exempt from criticism. Its genre-blending experimentation won’t be to everyone’s taste. Some listeners could have reservations about Beyoncé’s departure from her earlier pop and R & B records. That’s advantageous. Music, like all art forms, is subjective. Thoughtful critique can function a method for musicians to grow as artists, and to interact audiences in meaningful ways.
But that’s different from implying that Beyoncé can’t and shouldn’t sing country music just because of who she is: not a white man from a rural small town, but a Black woman raised in Houston. A “stay in your house” undercurrent cuts through how critics have spoken about her latest album, and it rubs me the incorrect way.
Who owns country music? By releasing Cowboy Carter, writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times, Beyoncé is claiming that she does. By “reinscrib[ing] a genre’s latent politics,” Beyoncé makes listeners “reckon with [their] complicity in that genre’s policing of who’s and shouldn’t be legitimately American.”
In my forthcoming book Womanish Theology: Discovering God Through the Lens of Black Girlhood, I reflect on one other query of possession: Who owns theology?
In the primary months of my seminary education, I read texts from a few of the white male theologians who had historically framed the discipline: Karl Barth, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Paul Tillich. For me, those texts were theology.
It was only when elective classes introduced me to Black, liberation, mujerista, womanist, and feminist theologies, writings from thinkers like James Cone, Gustavo Gutierrez, Katie Cannon, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, that I got here to grasp how marginalized voices could enliven my understanding of Jesus’ ministry. Excluding those voices as a big source of theological knowledge could be a mistake.
Reading different sorts of theology, whether from thinkers of various cultural backgrounds or thinkers with whom we’ve got profound disagreements, doesn’t need to undermine our own understanding of fundamental doctrine. We might disagree with some (or many) elements of an individual’s work. But that disagreement could be clarifying, helping us to develop our own arguments for what we consider. And diverse theology can provide latest perspectives on belief and practice, fresh interpretive lenses for Scripture, and deeper understandings of God’s consistent character.
Take liberation theology, which emphasizes God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed. It reminds us that God is actively involved within the struggle for justice and liberation. In mujerista theology, God is portrayed as immanent and relational, engaged within the on a regular basis struggles and triumphs of Latina women. In womanist theology, we pay particular attention to moments within the gospels when poor women encountered Jesus and his apostles.
In the identical way that theologians from different backgrounds can offer different perspectives on the character of the divine, country music as sung by Beyoncé provides its own unique perspective on the genre. Beyoncé adds context, just as other Black country artists like Linda Martell, Charley Pride, Tanner Adell, and Mickey Guyton have done.
How does a genre fixated on land and family and faith sound when Black artists tackle those themes and reflect them through their experiences in towns and houses and churches? Beyoncé’s rendition of “Blackbiird” puts the struggle for Black civil rights alongside Levi’s jeans and long roads and banjo licks. That old struggle is a component of our “country” too; as “American Requiem” puts it, “Nothin’ really ends / For things to remain the identical, they need to change again.”
“Oh, Louisiana, I stayed away from you too long / Oh, Louisiana, How can a real love go so incorrect?” goes one interlude, a sped-up Chuck Berry sample. Plenty of country songs are wistful about their roots. But Beyoncé’s reasons for staying away could be different.
An necessary caveat: Cowboy Carter doesn’t just offer something latest because its singer is Black. It offers something latest because its singer is Beyoncé—a world superstar, an icon. “This ain’t a Country album,” she wrote in her introductory Instagram post. “This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” That means listening for what Cowboy Carter has to say about fame and wealth, celebrity and pride—and using those declarations to grasp a musical tradition, and an American culture writ large, more fully. Her cover of “Jolene,” as an illustration, gives us one other view on the pain of betrayal from Queen Bey’s lofty vantage point.
“Used to say I spoke, ‘too country’ / And the rejection got here, said I wasn’t ‘country ’nough,’” Beyoncé sings in “American Requiem.” “Said I wouldn’t saddle up, but / If that ain’t country, tell me, what’s?”
I rejoice Cowboy Carter for its boldness, creativity, and depth. And I rejoice Beyoncé for fearlessly declaring that she belongs here too.
Khristi Lauren Adams is dean of spiritual life and equity and an instructor of spiritual studies on the Hill School. She is the creator of several books including Parable of the Brown Girl and Unbossed: How Black Girls Are Leading the Way.
