Each morning from the age of eight to 12, I took a schoolbus from outside my house to my primary school in the centre of town. The bus driver played a regional station and that station played country music. For an hour each day I stared out the window while Garth Brooks’s I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair’ and Loretta Lynn’s Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on your Mind) played like a soundtrack to the fields and squat bungalows rolling past. It was the mid-1990s. My class were rehearsing a choreographed line dance to Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart dressed in blue denim and our school uniform shirts. The coolest girl in our year, who wore Gap jeans her father had brought her back from the States, had taken actual lessons and was teaching us the steps.
The 1990s was a high point for country music in Ireland. A soundtrack for rural America, it found an outlet in mainstream media. Figures such as Brooks and Shania Twain were household names. Country’s appeal wasn’t only about the music. It gave an idealised version of Americana, with themes such as hard work, family values and small-town life resonating with global listeners.
The genre had a resurgence this year. Lana del Rey declared it to be popular music’s next frontier. And Beyoncé latest album, Cowboy Carter, was nominated for 11 awards in Sunday’s Grammy Awards, including album of the year. It all started with that cowboy hat at last year’s awards ceremony. Actually no, it began, Beyoncé says, with “an experience I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed”. In 2016, Beyoncé performed Daddy Lessons, a decidedly country track from Lemonade at the Country Music Awards to a hostile reception. Some viewers claimed that she “didn’t belong” on that stage.
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The irony of country is that while the frontman is a Midwesterner who works hard by day and drowns his sorrows in low places at night, the music betrays him in every measure. The banjo has its origins in west Africa, as do the bent or flattened notes that made their way from African music to blues notes into country crooning. Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their music traditions too, the lilting syncopated jigs and reels that underpin Appalachian folk and bluegrass. Spanish settlers introduced the guitar and ballad form. Jewish and eastern European populations brought polka and Klezmer. Then there’s Louisiana, where French-speaking Cajun communities blended Creole, blues and country into Zydeco. But yeah, okay, Beyoncé had no business on that stage in 2016. How can a picture this colourful distil to a white man in double-denim hugging a barn door? Maybe in the same way a country as culturally diverse as America can be governed almost exclusively by white men.
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The 2025 country revival happens as Trump takes office and the US develops a hard stance on immigration and rolls back DEI policies, complicating the genre’s themes of nationalism and the frontier. Here Cowboy Carter serves to highlight black artists already at work in country music. Shaboozey – (Collins Obinna Chibueze), a black genre-bending country-music artist from Virginia – collaborated on several tracks from the album. In 2024, he was nominated for a CMA award in his own right.
Beyoncé rides side saddle on a grey thoroughbred in a fitted red, white and blue jumpsuit. If drag is an overblown performance of femininity, then Beyoncé‘s outfit is a caricature of Americana. She holds the reins firmly in one hand and flies her own tasselled version of the American flag in the other. Texas Hold’em was the first song by a black woman to debut at no 1 on the country music billboards chart. The instrumentation is typical country – banjo, guitar, ukulele – with Beyoncé‘s instrument layered beautifully on top. It’s redolent of a hoedown until close to last orders where, with the dreamy strains of a Wurlitzer, the sawdust floor is switched out for disco tiles. And it’s magic. In Sixteen Carriages, she turns over the tropes of the country ballad – travelling and the 9-5 grind – and centres a touring mother who is “overworked and overwhelmed”. There are several covers too, notably Dolly Parton’s Jolene. Where Parton prostrates herself at the feet of a beautiful adversary who can steal her man for thrills, Queen Bey never begs. “I’m warnin’ you,” she sings.
“Genres are a funny little concept aren’t they? ... In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” This is Linda Martell, the first successful black female artist in country music, who can be heard on the track Spaghettii. Once an emblem of aspiration, the values tied to country music – patriotism, rugged individualism, the American dream – now feel, if not tainted by their ties to Trump-era politics, then at the very least complicated by the culture wars. The response to Cowboy Carter is also about more than just what we hear – it sounds out ongoing cultural tensions in America. It highlights the divide between those who see country music as an evolving, diverse space, and those who want to maintain its traditional (aka white, conservative) image.
The CMA failed to nominate Beyoncé‘s latest album for any awards, despite its commercial successes. And when Beyoncé took the stage at the CMAs in 2016, country music’s gatekeepers sent a clear message: You don’t belong here. Cowboy Carter answers with its own refrain: “I’m warnin’ you”. Country music is no longer a one-note song. And it never was.
As for Ireland, the last time country music was this cool, we all wanted Gap jeans from our friends who had been to the States on their holidays. Now America and what it stands for feel much more complicated, but that’s not to say we’re any less in love with the music.
Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin
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