Megastar Beyonce's highly anticipated country album casts a spotlight on efforts by Black performers to create a more inclusive Nashville.
Megastar Beyonce's highly anticipated country album casts a spotlight on efforts by Black performers to create a more inclusive Nashville."My hope is that years from now, the mention of an artist's race, as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant," Beyonce said recently. / Photo: AP
Megastar Beyonce's highly anticipated country album, out Friday, has cast a spotlight on efforts by Black performers — a vital part of the genre's history — to create a more inclusive Nashville."Is this what all the white girls have been feeling this whole time? Like, when they look at just someone who's at the top of their craft and is just killing it and you get to be like, 'Wow, that could be me' — it's pretty exciting.
The institution's name is a direct reference to the Grand Ole Opry, the nearly century-old country performance space whose complicated history has been shaped by Black performers, but which has also spotlighted figures linked to racist ideologies. Country is a quintessentially American style of music with influences from Africa: the banjo notably grew out of instruments brought to the Americas and the Caribbean by enslaved people in the 1600s.
These divisions have persisted, meaning Black musicians — especially Black women, as female artists at large have a demonstrably harder time getting airplay on tastemaking country radio — face significant barriers.
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