Country music is in its own bubble in the entertainment industry. Sure, there are crossover artists who start in Nashville and become pop stars — hello, Shania Twain and Taylor Swift — but it isn’t easy to go in the opposite direction. It’s not a secret that country music stars don’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for outsiders.
That’s where Beyoncé entered the conversation because her first country album, Cowboy Carter, was a huge success and is the best-selling album of 2024 so far, according to The New York Times. Still, the 43-year-old superstar was snubbed on Sept. 29 when the Country Music Association announced their nominees for the CMAs. While fans were outraged, this A-list country star weighed in with his opinion.
“Everybody loved that Beyoncé made a country album. Nobody’s mad about it. But where things get a little tricky … if you’re gonna make country albums, come into our world and be country with us a little bit,” American Idol judge Luke Bryan said on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live on Sept. 30, via . He thinks she didn’t try to hang with other musicians in the country music world. So, Bryan essentially admitted that the awards are a political game instead of being measured by an album’s creativity.
Bryan praised her as “probably the biggest star in music,” but he’s telling her she has to earn her place at the table. Yikes! “But come to an award show and high-five us, and have fun and get in the family, too. And I’m not saying she didn’t do that,” he added. “But country music’s a lot about family.” Did Bryan forget how cruel some country fans and radio stations were to Beyoncé when “Texas Hold ‘Em” was released in February?
A radio station in Oklahoma City tried to argue that Beyoncé didn’t belong in country music, but it was the Beyhive who set them straight after some serious backlash and cries of racism. “We initially refused to play it in the same manner if someone requested us to play the Rolling Stones on our country station,” KYKC general manager Roger Harris said in a statement to Today in February. “Fact is we play Beyoncé on TWO of our other stations and love her … she is an icon. We just didn’t know about the song … then when we found out about it, we tried to get the song … which we did and we have already played it 3 times on YKC, our country station.”
Even Dolly Parton, who had high praise for Beyoncé’s talent and her cover of “Jolene,” was somewhat wishy-washy in her stance on the CMA snub. “There’s so many wonderful country artists that, I guess probably the country music field, they probably thought, well, we can’t really leave out some of the ones that spend their whole life doing that,” she explained to Variety. “So, I don’t think it was a matter of shutting out, like doing that on purpose. I think it was just more of what the country charts and the country artists were doing, that do that all the time, not just a specialty album.”
Beyoncé is learning that support in the country music industry is hard to come by, even when you put out a great album.
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