Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ lifts covers off of little-known Black history

Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” may have set a record this week by rocketing to number one on the Billboard country music charts. But the Houston-born Knowles Carter, now the first Black woman to top the country charts, clarified for CNN that her recording was not a country album, but a Beyoncé album “rooted in country.” Even bigger than the superstar’s genre-bending success is that her pop culture platform has pulled the covers off of the hidden history of Black country music and Western culture. Beyonce’ accepts the Innovator Award at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on Monday, April 1, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Photo credit: Chris Pizzello, The Associated Press Supporting evidence includes “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions,” [2022]& by Francesca T. Royster and also& “The Black West: A Pictorial History,” by William Loren Katz (1987, 3rd& ed.). “You’ve [had] country & western Black singers for a long time,” said Cathy Jackson, Ph.D., of Norfolk State University in Virginia, who did her doctoral thesis on the American West. “Beyoncé added R&B flavor. She’s taken something that has been very popular and is just taking it to another level.”  More by Wayne Dawkins Remember, in 2020, Lil Nas...