A review of Cowboy Carter by a certified hillbilly son of the South from the streets of Nashville

(Left) author Nathan Monk standing in front of the Tennessee flag in Nashville and (right) Beyoncé riding a horse on the Cowboy Carter album cover

I was driving back from my little sister’s wedding, where she had just married a Black man in a Celtic-style ceremony held in a small Southern town on the Redneck Riviera along the panhandle stuck somewhere between Alabama and Louisiana. During my journey back from Pensacola to Nashville, my eyes were hypnotized by the road just outside Birmingham, Alabama. I pull off the interstate, passing the 6th Avenue Baptist Church, before pulling into my hotel. Of course, as soon as I made it into my room overlooking the colorful murals of the city, I was hit with a second wind. I need a drink; I say silently to myself before opening my phone to search for any open bars on a late night. About a half mile away, there was a strip club still serving up some Southern comfort to weary travelers like me. I put on my jacket and stroll down the curvy streets before bellying up to the bar.

“What will you have, honey?” The bartender asks me.

As I wait for my drink, a dancer approaches, “Would you like a dance, sweetie?”

“No, ma’am,” I say with my Southern drawl sneaking out, “I’m just getting a drink tonight.”

She assures me that she will be back to check in on me after a little while. The room is drenched in red lighting as Nikki Minaj blares on the jukebox while I tap the counter for another round. My eyes catch the glance of the dancer who has had her eyes on me since I first walked through those saloon doors. She walks back over, towering above me in her high heels.

“Can I ask you a weird question?” She says with a disarming smile.

“I’m an open book, shoot.”

“When you walked in, were you scared?”

“If what you are asking is, when I walked in, did I notice that I was the only white guy in the room? Sure, I noticed. But I wasn’t scared; I am Southerner. My mom’s side of the family is from Mississippi, my dad is from Louisiana, and I was raised in Nashville, always driving through Alabama to visit family along the panhandle; this isn’t my first rodeo being the only white guy in the room.”

“Oh! I didn’t realize you were country folk,” she said with an authentic smile this time.

Listen, y’all, we are about to have a messy conversation muddier than the Mississippi. Those of us down here have these types of talks all the time. This wasn’t my first time, and it won’t be the last, but it might be a bit uncomfortable for some of y’all less accustomed to such integrated chats as we used to here in the South. If we are going to truly understand why Cowboy Carter is not only important, but without question country, we are going to have to face down why we even have to have this conversation in the first place. So buckle up, buttercup, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, and get ready to have all of your misconceptions shattered about what you really think it means to be country folk, brought to you live from the Dirty South.

***

Like most folks from Nashville, I don’t spend much time in the city. Broadway has become overrun with tourists in bridal sashes and knock-off Stetson hats purchased from the overpriced gift shops that have replaced many of the historic honky tonks. Sure, Legends, Nudie’s, and The Stage are still here, but they are drowning under the spires of the fake brand of yeehaw establishments like Kid Rock’s. Yet, hidden under these bricked sidewalks tells a different story of a Southern history rich in scandal, sex, drugs, and a battle for the very soul of our nation that was settled just as much here as it was in Gettysburg.

If you take a turn off Broadway and up between 3rd and 4th, you will find a little spot called Printers Alley; it’s just a shadow of the den of sin it once was, but this used to be the place where the bootleggers would bring their wares to sell to the whores and pirates hiding out along the seedy underbelly of the city nestled far away from the antebellum plantations on the other side of town. This is the Nashville I know, the one that taught me to distrust the lawman and to find just as much comfort in the bosom of a brothel as I would confessing those sins at the altar call come Sunday morning.

The night that Beyoncé dropped Cowboy Carter was one of those rare weekends that I happened to be in the city. A driver came to pick me up for a dinner date with some friends who were in town for a show in the city.

“Where ya heading?” He asks me.

“Downtown,” I respond with a chuckle, “to watch all the boys visiting from up North lose their minds about Beyoncé releasing a country album, I guess.” The record dropped just before I pulled into town, and it was already a conversation on Twitter, so I was sure it was down on upper-Broadway as well. I had only made it a few tracks into the album before I had to switch gears and get ready for my gig as an impromptu local tour guide for my friends.

“Damn, bro,” the driver exclaims, “I didn’t know she released a country album. Let’s play it! You wanna play it?”

“Hell, yeah!” I respond, “I didn’t make it too far.”

American Requiem begins to play. A few seconds into the album’s first track, the driver says, “This sounds more like gospel than country.”

“Sure does, but that makes sense. There are twenty-something songs on this album. From what I have already heard, it sounds like she’s about to take us on a journey starting with the gospel roots of Memphis rhythm and blues on Beale Street before she takes us down to Music Row.”

I meet my friends for some BBQ with greens, cornbread, and a side of mac. The pit master is Black, our server is Black, and our food is Black. Meanwhile, the white man on the stage is singing Willie Nelson to a bunch of tourists who would just as soon see Snoop Dogg get arrested for a blunt without ever tasting the irony on their lips as they sing along to Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.

Snoop and Willie lighting up a joint

The question is floating around in the air, but most are too afraid to say the quiet part out loud: Is she allowed to do this? What gave Beyoncé the right to jump genres and swerve outside of her lane to sing country music? You are trying to kidnap what we have rightfully stolen! Let me make this clear: there is no controversy about Beyoncé recording a country album. Hell, I am not even saying you’ve got to like it. You are welcome to not like any music you choose. There are plenty of songs that folks love that I hate. This isn’t about whether the album is good (which it is) but about what it means to be country and who gets to choose what defines that genre.

As a local, I can say with absolute certainty that the Cowboy Carter Problem is a fan issue, not an artist one. More than that, it is a question of what kind of country you admire: Outlaw Country or the Toby Keith ilk of law-abiding post-pop rebranding of “country” as a neo-fascist dog whistle for a mythical Southern Whitetopia that has never and will never exist.

In order to understand what Mrs. Carter is doing here, you have to know country music, its origins, and why Black folks have always been a part of the story.

***

Yankees like to imagine that there is Manhattan, Los Angeles, Detroit, and then below them is “The South” as this massive monolith. Just like chitlins and grits, country music was born out of poverty and served up on dusty porches on the wrong side of the tracks. You’ve got jazz down in New Orleans making its way up the Mississippi River to Memphis, where it morphed into the rhythm and blues before jumping over to the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia, then echoing around the Blue Ridge Mountains in Knoxville, where the fiddles of poor Irish farmers began to blend with African bangos to bring us bluegrass. All of these different expressions of migrant cultural music are converging all across the South as the songs of working-class folk begin to form a distinctly American sound.

These are stories of escaping slavery, moonshine stills, outrunning the law, building workers unions, fighting government corruption, protests of unjust wars, pro-abortion anthems, and lamenting empty plates. These are unclean stories being told around campfires with hot chicken while your Meema did mountain magic in the kitchen. For every tale of a snake-handling preacher, there are countless fables of witches from the swamps of Louisiana to the forests of Georgia. These folks are building something up out of oppression and telling their stories in songs that sound a little bit like Sunday morning but feel a whole lot like fornication.

It makes sense that Cowboy Carter begins with a gospel narrative as Beyoncé tells the story of her struggles rising up in the South because that is precisely where country music begins: in the assembly of the church. Much like voodoo down in Louisiana started to adopt Catholic imagery as enslaved Haitians found ways to preserve their heritage in a world built by them but not for them, so too the gospel music of tent revivalists began to merge with the sinful sounds of subjugated people finding outlets to express both their joys and pain.

But most of y’all haven’t heard this music. You’ve heard Bob Dylan but not Woody Guthrie. You’ve listened to Elvis but not Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. You know Dolly, but what do you know of Linda Martell? From Memphis to New Orleans to Nashville, these stories and sounds echo through these hills as people of little means loan their fiddles to the next generation, telling them, “Child, do better, walk taller, and run up that mountain.”

No, you don’t know shit about that country.

Black cowboys because there have always been Black cowboys

The story picks up for most with the legends of Music Row during the golden age of the music of folk making its way into the mainstream consciousness during the early 1960s. Up to this point, the “old time-y” music of a different family of Carters were considered country. This brand of white gospel music with a twangy flair that was suddenly disrupted by voices like Johnny Cash crashing the party, singing about doing blow, smoking a joint, and shooting down anyone who crossed him. Then Dolly Parton put out a whole-ass song about an abortion, Loretta Lynn wrote a tune praising birth control, Johnny Cash performed in prisons, and Willie Nelson was smoking reefer while Snoop was still in his cradle. The emergence of country as pop culture exposed America to something that sounded a lot like the common plight of working-class people, and it slapped. However, it was still only just one side of the story.

Yes, there are examples of artists like Charley Pride touching the glass ceiling, but for the most part, mainstream country music was a white story with Black flavor.

That is pretty much where country music stayed. There have been some notable moments where attempts were made to reevaluate this, but they mostly failed (I am looking at you, Tim McGraw, and Nelly; I mean, y’all tried, and I love you for it). Lil’ Nas jumped in there and got scrappy for a minute, Chapel Heart almost broke through (and I still hope they do), and anyone who lives in this town of music will tell you that Black folks are in every recording studio, writing room, making up a good demographic of session singers and musicians. The question was still begging to be asked, “Who was going just to go ahead and finally kick this door down and admit the truth that country music is Black music too.”

***

The biggest lie you were told growing up is that the Civil War was North vs South. No, it was the United States fighting the Confederacy. When we say it was brother against brother, we don’t mean just the North and the South, but quite literally households divided ideologically. A great migration began as Northerners went southward to fight for the Confederacy, while plenty of Southerners packed up their rifles to enlist in the American army. Unfortunately, it became all too convenient a narrative to over-qualify the North as some bastion of liberalism devoid of racism and that bigotry is exclusively a Southern problem. Now, I am not going to pretend that we don’t have racism here. I know damn well we’ve got racism here; I won’t pretend we don’t.

Meanwhile, up North, they seemed just fine with rebranding plantations as prisons by way of a cleverly crafted loophole in the amendment meant to abolish slavery. For many up North, the problem wasn’t slavery itself; the issue was getting away from how slavery was perceived. The Thirteenth Amendment just cleaned up the mess, reconstruction labeled it as a Southern problem, and the world moved on with its steady diet of persecution, prosecution, and lynchings by another name called the justice system.

Because we have framed this as a North vs South dichotomy and chose not to face the real problems of systemic racism in this nation, which is an American problem and not a regional one, we’ve collectively buried the Blackness of the South in entertainment and politics. Southern pride has become a coded language for upholding systems of oppression by suppressing Black Southern heritage by pretending it isn’t here. However, as the epicenter of country music, Nashville has a unique place in the story of the liberation of the South as a stronghold of the Confederacy.

I’ll tell you the Southern heritage I’m proud of: the Knoxville Unionists. The state of Tennessee was the last to join the Confederacy and the first to be liberated. I’m abbreviating a lot of history here, but basically, Tennessee supplied more soldiers to the Union than any other state. As a result, many men left the state to fight in Virginia and elsewhere. Up to this point, the secessionist movement had failed in Tennessee multiple times, but once those soldiers left, the Tennessee legislature pushed through the secession vote. When the Union soldiers from Knox County heard that Nashville had fallen, they circled back, took the bridge, and reclaimed Nashville for the Union. As a result, Tennessee became the first state admitted back into the Union, ratified the amendments to the constitution, and was the only former Confederate-occupied state not to have a military governor during Reconstruction.

The United States Army takes the capital during the Battle of Nashville liberating it from the treasonous government known as the Confederacy

This matters because most of us down here know this, and it has shaped the character of our community. This is what it means to be be country, fighting together for our neighbors, and we keep on winning. The South didn’t lose, the Confederacy did. The South won the right to stay part of the Union. This is essential to understand because it not only a critical formation of what it means to be country but it also explains why it has remained important to Beyoncé not to let us forget that she is from here too. The reality is that the South is home to more people of color than anywhere else in these United States. That is right, the largest demographics of both Black, Brown, and queer people in the Union is right here in the South. Almost every Civil Rights leader you love to quote come February was raised in the South, and their voices rose from Jackson, Mississippi to Montgomery, Alabama. And don’t forget that Loving v. Virginia was two Southerners fighting for their right to love each other publicly. The South has been fighting for itself, often against the prejudice of the North, choosing to disregard us as nothing more than a Third World Country just south of the Mason/Dixon line. Make no mistake, when you disparage the South, as well as country music, you might see white faces in your mind, but you are lobbing those accusations at the millions of Black Americans who call the South home, too.

Every country singer on the planet, whether from Austin or Australia, owes a debt to the Black artists who gifted a rhythm to an America that refused to create space for them. I dare you to find a country singer who hasn’t benefited from a Black session singer, picker, or piano player or hasn’t had a Black choir lifting our souls… from the background. I am not saying that there haven’t been plenty of Black Country performers who have been in the spotlight throughout the ages, which, of course, makes the outrage over Beyoncé all that more absurd. I am in no way diminishing the consistent contributions to the genre from folks like Alice Randall to Darius Rucker. There is a long and consistent history of Black artists shaping the future of the genre, which makes a lot of sense because Black artists birthed it.

There are plenty of moments throughout the history of country music that we could focus on that quite literally robbed Black artists of their place at the table. Still, there are few moments in history that so grossly changed the very fabric of county music then when Toby Keith put down the machine that kills fascists and traded it in for a sheriff's badge.

Up to September 11th of 2001, we had worked real hard down here to reshape the narrative. Garth Brooks began singing a new type of crossover country that started to find air-time on the mainstream radio again. Alan Jackson invited everyone to go country because, “down here it's changed, you see, we're not as backward as we used to be.” But then, we got hit by a mighty sucker punch which came flying in from somewhere in the back. This suddenly shook the promise of a New South and called the question of the nature of what it means to be a country.

After 9/11, the very character of our country was on display for the whole world to see. Many were ready to hunt our Muslim cousins from sea to shining sea. Two competing voices were rising from Nashville. Toby Keith responded to the attack with a quick release of the song that would eventually define his entire career, The Angry American (Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue), which was a defiant act of provocation with a violent overtone. This fight anthem caused him to become the new face of country music, and a dangerous rebranding of Nashville began as the battleground of the social wars were upholding the actual wars.

Then, The Chicks condemned President Bush and the impending invasion of Iraq from the stage at a show in London, declaring they were ashamed that he was from their state. Their cancelation was swift, brutal, and dangerous. Make no mistake; the industry is going to follow the money, and rage was selling. When Natalie Maines of The Chicks moved in the spirit of traditional country music and chose to speak out for the common folk, they received an instant backlash, but Toby continued to climb the charts. "Don't get me started," Maines told the Los Angeles Daily News, "I hate it. It's ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant. It targets an entire culture… not just the bad people who did bad things. You've got to have some tact. Anybody can write, 'We'll put a boot in your ass.’” Those shots fired resulted in Toby Keith plastering Natalie Maines's photo next to Saddam Hussein at his concerts.

Beyoncé performing with The Chicks at the 2016 CMA Awards performing the country song Daddy Lessons.

Just a month after The Chicks made those fateful, yet true, statements about the War in Iraq and the complicity of our president, Toby Keith released Beer For My Horses. This anthem abandoned the rich history of glorifying the outlaw and instead made the lawman the hero of the story. The upbeat, catchy tune was a battle cry to clean up the cities and let law and order win the day. However, when you remove the beat and read just the lyrics, it sounds like this brand of country wishes to resurrect the Confederacy and bury the legacy of the Knoxville Unionists:

Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son

A man had to answer for the wicked that he done

Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree

Round up all them bad boys, hang them high in the street

For all the people to see

That justice is the one thing you should always find

You got to saddle up your boys; you got to draw a hard line

When the gun smoke settles, we'll sing a victory tune

And we'll all meet back at the local saloon

We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing

Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds

Too much corruption, and crime in the streets

It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground

Send 'em all to their maker, and he'll settle 'em down

You can bet he'll set 'em down

With The Angry America and Beer for My Horses, Toby Keith successfully shifted the narrative of country music away from being the music of folk and into a dog whistle of a false type of neo-patriotism being violent towards anyone who didn’t look like the alt-right version of America. As a result, Music City began to look a lot more white and blond, full of God, guts, and guns. Somebody call Alan Jackson because there had been a murder down on Music Row.

***

This Cold Civil War has been raging for a couple of decades now as the world of country music has been divided between those attempting to take the South into the future and those who want to drag us back to the past. Though there have been countless attempts to win this Second Battle of Nashville, nothing has called the question until Mrs. Carter jumped on her high horse. Beyoncé begins Cowboy Carter with a gospel-rooted country hymn, establishing her street cred with American Requiem:

Nothin' really ends

For things to stay the same, they have to change again

Hello, my old friend

You change your name, but not the ways you play pretend

American Requiem

Them big ideas (Yeah), are buried here (Yeah)

Amen

...

Looka there, looka in my hand

The grandbaby of a moonshine man

Gadsden, Alabama

Got folk down in Galveston, rooted in Louisiana

Used to say I spoke too country

And the rejection came, said I wasn't country 'nough

Said I wouldn't saddle up, but

If that ain't country, tell me what is?

Plant my bare feet on solid ground for years

They don't, don't know how hard I had to fight for this

When I sang my song

This suddenly sounds like the kind of country I grew up on, the defiant rebel yell of a woman ready to do a lot of “takin' up space” as she sings something that rings like the origins of the music that rolled up the Mississippi and found its home on Beale Street long before it made Elvis shake his pelvis. The album continues as a master class on the history of country music. Each track takes us along to the next evolution of the genre, with momentary interruptions by Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson acting as context DJs between each cosmic shift.

American Requiem is immediately followed by a country-fried rendition of Blackbird, originally made famous by the Beatles. Now, you might be asking what this song could possibly have to do with country music, and I am glad y’all asked because I’m about to tell y’all that Queen Bee is calling your hand. The song is possibly one of Paul McCartney’s most famous songs in a long catalog of his lyrical genius. Back in 1974, the undisputed rock icon came to Nashville, where he was blessed by Dolly and Porter Waggoner and visited the Grand Ole Opry before he wrote a country song called Sally Q that landed on the B Side of The Wings album that was recorded right here on Music Row. Now, absolutely no one said that the British rocker had no business doing this, but Beyoncé prophetically knew that folks were going to say it about her. She begins her country album by flipping the script and launching off with the song McCartney wrote as a response to Black oppression in the Jim Crow South.

Paul McCartney being welcomed to Nashville by Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner

This is both a callback and a call out to what was certain to happen when she dropped these tracks because it’s the same thing that always happens when Black artists do the exact same thing that white artists have done: outrage. Just like y’all sing along to Eric Clapton or Johnny Cash singing about cocaine but then foam at the mouth when a Black rapper does it. The Black artists are accused of destroying America, but the white folks get a pass as outlaws while we bomb Black Wall Street and drop drugs into the Black neighborhoods to replenish those plantations you call prisons.

Ready to double down on showcasing this hypocrisy, we have Willie Nelson ready to introduce the first single off of Cowboy Carter. We hear the sounds of a radio channeling through several different styles of country before we settle on KNTRY TEXAS, where we hear someone lighting up. The channel surfing is disrupted by a distinctive voice on the radio saying, “Welcome to the Smoke Hour, you know my name, no need to know yours.” This brief and effective track shows that we know two things: that Willie Nelson smokes weed, and not one of us gives a good goddamn that he does.

Bam! Y’all just got smoked because you ain’t about to say a damn word about Willie Nelson being the one promoting drug use on the Black Country album. Now it’s time for a quick cut to Texas Hold’em: the song you are about to say isn’t country enough and is outside her lane; well, let me tell ya, it sure as hell is country, and it’s absolutely her lane because that lane is the streets she cut her teeth on.

Now, nobody does anything in Tennessee without the blessing of another queen: Mama Dolly Parton. But before we get to Dolly, we take a brief break at a song called Bodyguard. This song is a sudden jolt from the twangy Texas Hold’em, and so what are we doing? Again, this is a clever call out of epic proportions.

Back in 1974, the same year as McCartney’s country debut, Dolly Parton recorded what would become one of her epic masterpieces, I Will Always Love You. This song was distinctively Dolly until the 1992 release of the movie The Bodyguard starring Whitney Houston, who recorded the song as a soul ballad, and the song was suddenly no longer exclusively Dolly’s anymore. The Bodyguard was a controversial film, and it has been well noted that Kevin Costner had to fight racism in Hollywood to get Whitney cast in the role. It was also later revealed that Dolly re-invested her royalties from the Whitney Houston recording into Black neighborhoods in Nashville. Beyoncé’s Bodyguard track blends into a heartfelt letter read aloud by Dolly Parton that is reminiscent of the opening track of Dolly’s eleventh album My Tennessee Mountain Home which began with her reading a letter she wrote to her parents from her first week in Nashville.

For her first contribution to the Cowboy Carter album, Dolly coos in her soft East Tennessee accent:

Hey Miss Honeybee, it's Dolly P

You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about?

Reminded me of someone I knew back when

Except she has flamin' locks of auburn hair

Bless her heart

Just a hair of a different color but it hurts just the same

Let me make it very clear that Dolly isn’t baptizing Beyoncé as a country artist; she is acknowledging that she has always been a country artist. This is not the Queen of Country anointing Beyoncé. No, this is game recognizing game and queen bowing to queen. Dolly is saying we are the same. Like when Whitney took I Will Always Love You and infused it with soul, Beyoncé imbues Jolene with Blackness. Dolly begged, but Beyoncé is warning. She is unafraid to cut this bitch if she has to, and I am here for it. She is modeling being unashamed of the fact that she is here; she will not be quiet, she will not straighten her hair if she doesn’t want to, and you are going to just have to deal with it because her Daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana and she is unapologetic about it.

But y’all better hold onto your boots because a tornado of more calling out is rolling through, and you don’t have a basement to hide in. Just when you were finally ready to accept that this was a country album, Beyoncé drops the sickest rap song I’ve heard in decades, aptly called SPAGHETTI, which, to me, is a clear call back to Marshal Mathers, someone else we’ve all allowed to jump into a genre that many felt that he wasn’t supposed to be in but Dr. Dre fought for his space on the stage. Again, we didn’t have a problem when a different white rapper from Michigan said he was a “cowboy, baby.” If this quantifiably non-country boy from Michigan could be accepted as a country like Alan Jackson promised in Gone Country, then why wouldn’t Beyoncé be extended the same courtesy since she is, without question, country?

Willie Nelson jumps back on the radio to intro the second half of the album with another disc jockey announcement to answer that very question:

You're turned into KNTRY Radio Texas, home of the real deal

And if there’s one thing you can take away from my set today, let it be this:

Sometimes you don't know what you like until someone you trust turns you on to some real good shit

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm here

Up next on "The Smoke Hour" is "JUST FOR FUN" by Beyoncé

You’re welcome

Then we are hit rapid fire with a few duets between Beyoncé and Willie Jones, the genre-defying hip-hop country singer, then we’ve got Miley Cyrus, a country music legend turned pop star, and then finally, Post Malone, a white rapper. Is your head spinning from how much you weren’t prepared to shut the fuck up about how there isn’t a goddamn lane for Beyoncé to stay in because no other artist has done so, and we just let them, maybe sometimes with a little bit of grief, but nothing like she knew y’all were going to do with her. This album does not ignore anyone who contributed to the genre with such tracks as Riverdance, which has a beautiful Celtic intro calling everyone to join in and dance. Irish step-dancing originated from oppression before they escaped to the Americas, where they would find a new type of freedom away from British rule and make their own contributions to the sound we would one day call country. Beyoncé forgets no one as she blends all these hymns together.

Beyoncé tipping her hat to all the haters

For good measure, Beyoncé invites the whole family along for the ride on her white horse down Broadway: Jon Batiste, Linda Martell, Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, Reyna Roberts, Rumi Carter, Willie Jones… and, of course, you can’t have a fiddle on a country record without one of my personal all-time favorites: Rihannon Giddens. There isn't enough time to list everyone who has an appearance on this album to help make it a truly and distinctively country record.

Let me explain to you who this album offends: tourists. The suburban cowboys who drive big trucks with Trump flags while idolizing the Lost Cause myth. These are not country folk but the self proclaimed “disenfranchised middle class” who make heroes out of the wrong characters in Westerns. As someone who grew up in Nashville, I can assure you this isn’t country. This brand of fans are the ones who think that when they get here, they are going to find a safe space for the bigotry. What they will find is a Nashville that has had a Democrat as mayor since the city first consolidated with the county back in the 1960s. Nashville is a blue city shining on a hill. We get to set the tone of what it means to be country; not just Dolly or Toby, but we as a community are the ones who push the genre, all of us together. This is Black music, Celtic music, Gospel music, Outlaw music: the music of folk. Make no mistake, Nashville is not what you think it is; neither is country music. We are the South that marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yes, we’ve still got our problems; everywhere does. It was Tennesseans who kicked the Justins out of the State House, but it was also Tennesseans who said, “Hell, nah” before immediately reinstating them. We are fighting for our lives down here, y’all. We’ve needed a new sound that hits a little bit like the old sound, as a battle cry to propel us into what this New South could look like, and it turns out that this music was inside Beyoncé the whole damn time.

Just like Dolly and Willie, Linda Martell joins us for a bit of commentary on what it means to be country in a country that is far too black and white:

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

That is exactly the question this album both poses and answers: what is a genre, what is country, and what does it mean to be American, especially for those who are being told they don’t belong here? Listen, I am just going to say it, as a certified hillbilly son of the South from the streets of Nashville, Cowboy Carter is the most country album I have heard in a long time. It is raw, dangerous, and in your face. It is written in the very spirit of the outlaws I grew up with who were ready to take on the challenges of the day with the soul of Beale Street riding shotgun. It is dripping with pride and ready to fight. You feel like you might get in trouble for listening to it, as if maybe the FEDs are going to come bust us all up for playing this on the desegregated porches of the South because, if we all start questioning the rules that they say we can’t, we might just light up a joint together with a chaser of some of that good ol’ mountain dew. Beyoncé isn’t breaking into the country; she has always been country: this was always her birthright, and she is finally claiming it. Now, my friends, it’s time to get with it because this album is a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown, so don't be a bitch; come take it to the floor now.