“You’ll remember me ’cause we got somethin’ to prove”: Cowboy Carter and Beyoncé’s Legacy-Building Project

Jessica Swanston Baker

A legacy is the sum of what endures after a life has ended—an accumulation of tangible and intangible contributions that persist in communal memory. This paper emerges from my nascent research on music and end-of-life care, where I’m interested in understanding how legacies are built and maintained, particularly through sonic practice. To approach this, I analyze the content and context of Beyoncé’s 2024 country music album, Cowboy Carter. Having recently and controversially won the Grammy for Country Album of the Year, Cowboy Carter capitalizes on Beyoncé’s southern roots and musical diasporic nomadism to reimagine American Country Music history. In doing so, she features fresh Black country talent (including emerging stars like Tanner Adell) and offers reimagined covers of beloved Country staples while also deploying central country music conventions like the utilization of a time-shift narrative.

Following a brief ethnographic description of Tanner Adell’s December 2024 Chicago concert, this paper explores how Cowboy Carter can be understood as a powerful statement of legacy creation. By examining the sonic choices, thematic content, and collaborative networks that shape Cowboy Carter, I illustrate how Beyoncé uses country music’s conventions to lay claim to a cultural heritage that has historically underrecognized Black contributions. This work highlights how her artistry, combined with the voices of those in her orbit, reflects and reshapes conceptions of what endures beyond a singular lifetime. Cowboy Carter demonstrates how popular music contributes to America’s ongoing political battle over narrative power, redefining the boundaries of legacy and who gets to craft it.

Corrido Tumbado: Making Sense of Maleficent Media in Michoacán, Mexico

Chris Batterman Cháirez

In Mexico and elsewhere, the recent popularity of the musical genre corrido tumbado and associated popular media have been interdicted by the state and cartel violence associated with the so-called “war on drugs.” This rural music often sings of bloody deeds, cartel heroes, and the enduring charisma of the narco lifestyle, called bélico (bellicose). This paper draws on fieldwork in rural Michoacán, Mexico to explore the place of violent media in ordinary life and illuminates the ways in which local, largely Indigenous communities make sense of conflict and political turmoil through the circulation and consumption of this media. I argue that these media ecosystems and infrastructures not only contour local resident’s understandings and misunderstandings of local violence but also engender public apprehension of the Mexican state. And I suggest that the massive popularity of this music signals a more intensely mediated yet less-clear cut era of the drug war and interdicts the shifting grounds of political authority and legitimacy in rural Mexico. On one level, this paper is an ethnographic account drawn from over 2 years of fieldwork of musical media and the experience of state violence in Mexico. On another level, this paper models an approach to popular and country music that shifts the analysis away from texts and contexts and rather to the messy realm of circulation, feeling, and experience. What do we make of corrido’s bellicose sounds?

KNTRY Radio Texas and Radiophonic Worldbuilding

Fiona Boyd

This paper discusses Beyoncé’s radiophonic practices in her 2024 country album Cowboy Carter. Throughout the course of the work, Beyoncé and her musical collaborators build a world around a fictional radio station, KNTRY Radio Texas, DJ’d by famed country outlaw Willie Nelson. Building on ethnographic research on radio discrimination in country music from my work with the Black Opry country music collective, I argue here that that the sounds and iconography of KNTRY Radio Texas help build a creative imaginary in which Black voices and sounds lie at the center of country radio. The paper discusses how Beyonce’s attention to Black radio comes from a lineage of what Emily J. Lordi calls “album-as-radio,” wherein artists, such as Robert Glasper in his Black Radio albums, harness the aesthetic and significatory power of radio to imagine otherwise. The visuals and sounds for Cowboy Carter build a historically informed musical world in which blackness is inextricably linked with countryness. With KNTRY at the helm, Beyoncé reformats country radio listening, broadcasting the genre’s multiracial history and present while transmitting “1000 watts of healing power” to transform Americana.

The Stuff of Bluegrass: Billy Strings in the Contemporary Music Market

Chelsea Burns

In October 2024, Billy Strings’s album Highway Prayers hit number one for all genres in Billboard’s ranking of Top Album Sales. This was momentous not only for Strings, but for the genre more broadly: it was the first time that a bluegrass album had hit number one since 2002, when O Brother Where Art Thou garnered the top spot. Within the bluegrass industry, Strings is hailed as a game-changer of sorts, playing venues of a larger scale than any other artist. Known for his virtuosic guitar skills and extended jam-style performances, he has attracted an audience that is broader than that enjoyed by most bluegrass musicians.

When this audience listened to Highway Prayers, what did they hear? While one or two tracks venture into psychedelic territory with electric guitar and piano, most of the album follows familiar harmonic, instrumental, melodic, formal, and textual markers of recent bluegrass. How does this album, which largely matches standard bluegrass genre boundaries, speak to an audience that appears to be out of reach for most bluegrass musicians? This talk explores the relationship between musical audiences, musical content, and the choice to purchase full albums. Of course, Strings’s audiences purchase the album not only out of interest in the music, but also as a means of financial support. But beyond that, these numbers reflect a shifting music economy; while purchases of Highway Prayers stand out, the numbers represented by this number-one slot are radically different from those of prior decades.

Time to Face the Music?

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher

American country music was already having a weird moment before controversy erupted over musicians’ participation in the 2025 Presidential Inauguration and Beyoncé’s Best Country Album Grammy Award two weeks later. This controversy built on the 2019 uproar surrounding Lil Nas X’s record-breaking hit “Old Town Road,” which resumed the genre-long and genre-wide fight over who and what counts as country music, a debate that Richard Peterson (1997) and Joli Jensen (1998), among others, have argued creates a crisis at the heart of the genre. The tumult hinges on passionate debates about how identity figures into genre and whether music is inherently political. I would argue that the symbolism and use value different groups of listeners have come to expect from music are framed by what historian Richard Slotkin identifies as longstanding and seemingly incompatible origin narratives about America (2024). We scholars also seem to be compelled and perhaps hindered by this ideological obstacle. One frequent scholarly approach to music, which can be traced back to the founding of popular music studies and further developed by New Musicology and ethnomusicology’s turn to the local (rather than the universal), is to choose a topic that, in addition to its contribution to knowledge, also communicates something about the author’s beliefs. In this talk I explore the recent controversies in country music to consider how listener expectations and scholarly approaches may (often unintentionally) reinforce arguments that not only rely on stereotypes, and limit our scholarly understanding and impact, but also impede these artists’ demonstrations of musical and social interaction.

“Distant Drums”: US Country/Western Music in India, 1960-1990

Sumanth Gopinath and Anna Schultz

US country/western music rarely figures into narratives of popular music in South Asia, and yet it has been a constant presence in the subcontinent since the 1960s. Significant moments include the postcolonial spread of Jim Reeves’s posthumous 1966 hit “Distant Drums,” the 1968 appearance of Usha Iyer/Uthup’s cover of Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya,” and the rise of the so-called “curry western” in the 1970s, especially Sholay (1975). Our provisional argument is that US country/western music exists in India during 1960s–1970s as a nascent if somewhat familiar presence, often hardly distinguished from other Western popular music if at all, and that subsequent developments—including the growing popularity of Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton in the 1980s, expanding migrant networks between US country music centers and South Asia in the 1970s–1990s, and the emergence by the early 2000s of Indian country music singer/songwriter Bobby Cash—mark a definite shift in awareness and appreciation of the genre. If, within our earlier periodization, country/western existed in solution, rather than as precipitate (Williams 1977, 133–34), what consequences might have this had for urban elite formation in South Asia, migration in the American south, and music-stylistic mixing within South Asia? Moreover, what does “country” mean to listeners in India, far from the sites of the music’s production and the landscapes of its imaginaries? Our multimodal perspective is supported by oral histories, a study of Binaca Hit Parade playlists, review of Indian popular coverage of country music, and close readings of select songs.

Country as Quintessentially Mexican American Music

Nadine Hubbs

In my conversations with Mexican American country music fans in the Southwest borderlands, interlocutors described country as uniquely relatable to their lives, feelings, and “Mexican values,” including family, faith, and hard work. They heard country music as American, and as Mexican, and they linked country’s Mexican elements—which include cowboy hats and boots, border sounds, and sparkly embroidered suits—to the Mexican origins of the Southwest itself. Patriotic country songs inspired bicultural pride in my interlocutors, who attested not that country music offers belonging but that it belongs to Mexican Americans.

 Expanding on these country lovers’ arguments, I propose one reason Mexican contributions go unrecognized in country is that Mexican elements—cowboy, ranch, western wear, the Southwest—are often perceived as country music’s most iconically American attributes. To undo such erasure I revisit country music history and highlight formative Mexican moments: hillbilly music’s 1930s embrace of the singing cowboy; the 1940s heyday of western swing; the prime of California’s Bakersfield country scene in the 1950s–60s; the 1970s rise of country music’s first Mexican American stars, Johnny Rodriguez, Freddy Fender, and Linda Ronstadt, concurrent with intensified racial gatekeeping in the industry; and the present situation of Mexican American artists and audiences amid ongoing changes to country music history and identity.

Country music serves as an emblem of American identity and values and has often been characterized as “quintessentially American.” Drawing on borderlands dialogues and archives, I’ll argue that country is quintessentially Mexican American music, and I’ll discuss why this matters.

Tune In: “Nashville” vs. Nashville

Travis A. Jackson

For United States residents or country music lovers who have never lived in Nashville, the city might register as a center for country music. Varied audiovisual media, including the television series Hee Haw (1969–1993) and Nashville (2012–17) and the films Nashville (1975) and The Thing Called Love (1993), have reinforced that association. For a number of reasons and at various junctures, however, the city’s leaders, boosters and residents have emphasized labels like “the Athens of the South” or “Music City, USA.” Those latter appellations and a weekly newspaper feature that targeted amateur musicians and ran in The Tennessean in the 1970s and 1980s suggest alternate ways of seeing the city. Using such items as points of departure, this presentation focuses on the active, everyday ways Nashvillians sought to resist their city’s being labeled (only) as a country locale and on what, stylistically, racially and culturally, the association has tended strategically to erase.

Hearing Place/Feeling Structures: Quare Affects and Strategies in Appalachia and Americana

Jacob Kopcienski

Since the 2010s, queer and trans Americana musicians from Appalachia have gained precarious success with national and regional audiences.  Based in East Tennessee, Amythyst Kiah and Adeem the Artist have gained critical and scholarly recognition for music that “sincerely” represents queer perspectives in mainstream country music (Goldin-Perschbacher, 2022). Marginalized from the Nashville-based country music industry, both have also navigated careers as visibly queer working musicians amidst rapidly shifting conditions in Appalachia. Recently, this includes: accelerating deindustrialization and economic neo-liberalization; the opioid epidemic, right-wing cultural conservatism; and climate change.

In response to these tensions, this paper analyzes the expressive strategies Adeem and Kiah use to represent queer/trans perspectives on the conditions that shape life in Appalachia. Drawing from Hil Malatino’s concept “side-affects” (Malatino, 2022), I examine how cultural and kinship norms, economic conditions, addiction and biopolitics, and political structures pattern queer and trans-Appalachian’s affective experiences of place (Stimeling, 2020). I mobilize scholarly applications of quare— a term connoting strangeness in Appalachian and Black southern culture— as an intersectional framework (E. Patrick Johnson, 2001) to analyze how both artists adapt narrative, vocal, and stylistic traditions to critically represent these conditions, and imagine otherwise possibilities.

Amythyst Kiah’s “Southern Gothic” albums connect affective states of alienation to white supremacy and melancholy/addiction to economic displacement. Drawing from Black vocal, lyric, and instrumental traditions (folk, blues, rock), Kiah’s music negotiates these states by (dis)identifying with musical tropes of Appalachian and Southern feminine cis-heterosexuality to realize liberatory Black feminist aesthetics and ethics(Royster, 2012; Murchison 2018). Adeem’s queer country albums connect depression to cis-heternormativity in Christianity; addiction to the opioid epidemic; and rage/madness to neoliberal economies and U.S. nationalism. Adeem’s music (dis)identifies with sonic and narrative tropes in Appalachian traditions and 1990s country music to critique white working-class masculinity and imagine intersectional coalitions. 

Analyzing interviews and performances, I argue that both artists operationalize aesthetic negotiations with styles to create new forms of “acoustic” citizenship (Sonevytsky, 2019) for building community in Appalachia and navigating the country music industry. Ultimately, this paper offers a case study for theorizing localized queer/trans engagements with country music as models for understanding and organizing against transnational phenomena (extractive capitalism, right-wing authoritarianism, and climate change).

Song Form as Historical Narrative in Country Music

Jocelyn R. Neal

The big questions about country music’s genre identity, sociological construction, and cultural meaning often seem divorced from aspects of musical form and syntax. Yet the ways that songwriters construct their songs tell us a lot about the cultural context and genre in which they are working.  And the changes in songwriting practice over the past century offer insights into the larger historical narrative of country as a genre.

In this paper, I explore case studies from different periods in country music’s evolution, where the song forms that dominated commercial country at any given time grew out of specific political and cultural contexts for the music.  In each of these cases, the domains of chord progressions, melodic structures, and formal models are far from neutral mechanics of musical creation.  Instead, they offer rich narratives mainly encapsulated in the practices of co-writing, from the collaborations between Hank Williams and Fred Rose to the present-day teams where each member holds different responsibilities in the creative process.  What emerges is a different lens through which to view the age-old story of country music’s entanglements with pop-crossover movements and complicated racially-grounded narratives of musical identity.  In other words, song form tells a story in more ways than one.

“What’s that got to do with Mexico?”: Country Music and the U.S. American Empire

Rumya Putcha

Since at least the late nineteenth century, performers have wielded the symbolic power of Mexico to express U.S. American subjectivities. Beginning in the twentieth century, country musicians Gene Autry and Hank Williams, to name only a couple, portrayed the quintessential American man, the cowboy, through his associations with Mexico. These expressions circulated through films, advertisements, on the radio, and through recordings just as the U.S. government began to stage a series of covert operations across Latin America. During and after the Cold War and now, into the twenty-first century, the symbolic power of Mexico has evolved, but it has remained, scaffolding imaginations of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. Drawing on methods from critical race and transnational feminist theory as well as performance studies, this presentation focuses on these imaginations in country music publics over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately, I interrogate how performers have reconciled and romanticized unstable ideas of what and where Mexico is and by doing so articulated gendered and racialized expressions of the American Empire. 

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Mobility and the Unfinished Dream of Black Imaginative Freedom

Francesca T. Royster | Keynote

It is often repeated in critical conversations about Beyoncé’s 2024 Grammy-Award-winning Cowboy Carter that she created it in response to negative responses that she had received in country music industry spaces to her country-inflected 2016 song “Daddy Lesson.” Her response has been to create an album that plays freely with country music sounds, songwriting styles and imagery, while also adding her own multi-generic style, also pulling from House, hip-hop, rock, r and b, soul, blues, flamenco and opera. This talk explores Cowboy Carter’s use of metaphors of flight, escape and other aspects of mobility as they work together with the album’s generic boundary pushing to express the “not yet” status of Black (queer) imaginative freedom. For example, “II Hands II Heaven,” is one of several songs on Cowboy Carter that speak to the centrality of stories of finding love and mobility in Black country, blues, and rhythm and blues music. Whether by horse, train, Cadillac or starship, Black music is shaped by stories of leaving, returning and wandering to places known and unknown.   In “II Hands to Heaven,” Beyonce uses a Western landscape as a new space for yearning, as country twang and rhythm slides into a queer-inflected and house music-fueled ecstasy. 

This American Life, According to Jolene

Stephanie Shonekan

Between 1973 and 2024, the iconic song “Jolene” has been covered numerous times by a wide range of artists. Each singer has addressed the anti-hero of the song, Jolene, with a careful rendering of the words that Dolly Parton penned over 50 years ago. But in 2024, Beyoncé Knowles boldly recast the song – different  words, different tone, different effect. In her version, the approach to Jolene shifted significantly from a tentative posture of begging to a steady stance of warning. While this song remains a heartfelt message between two women about love and betrayal, it offers an opportunity to zoom out to an examination of the message between two other women separated by 5 decades – Dolly Parton and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. The stark contrast in the treatments of this song by these two American women offers lessons about the historical and cultural shifts in American life over a 50 year period. How does a Black woman in 2024 hone a subject first introduced by a white woman in 1973 and what lessons can we draw from the subtle and bold changes that Beyoncé makes, and the reception these changes received from fans and critics? Using “Jolene” as a springboard, this paper will explore critical themes of race, gender, love, and democracy in America. 

What Covers History: Chance the Rapper, Tracy Chapman, and the Country Cover Song

Amy Skjerseth

This paper explores country cover songs that raise vexed debates in popular music: the stickiness of genre categorizations, the status of original versus “copy,” and perceived markers of “authentic” singing. In 2021 on Jimmy Fallon’s That’s My Jam, Chance the Rapper transformed Nelly’s 2002 “Hot in Herre” into a country rock bop. Fallon’s “Musical Genre Challenge” supposedly randomly selects a song for Fallon’s guest to sing in a completely different genre, but the performance is highly polished–a reality TV hallmark. For critic Jessica Wang, Chance adapts Nelly’s hip-hop/rap hit with a “silky smooth […] southern accent so convincing you might just think you’re at the Grand Ole Opry” (2021). Wang’s surprise at the cover’s embodiment of country, coupled with the audience’s shocked looks, underline the recording industry’s long association of country music with whiteness, despite recent calls–and Grammys–to acknowledge country’s roots in Blackness (Giddens, 2019; Royster, 2022; Beyoncé, 2024). To further delve into the racial politics of country covers, this paper examines audiences’ and critics’ surprised reactions to Luke Combs’s 2023 cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which made Chapman the first Black woman with a solo writing credit on a country hit (Billboard). As I argue, fashioning one’s voice into a supposedly antithetical genre from the original exposes the arbitrariness of genres and other aesthetic judgments about music (Brackett, 2016). Exploring cover songs as a vehicle through which artists can refashion expectations about genre, vocality, and race, I show their transformative force in and beyond the music industry.

Billboard Charts and 1990s Country: The Myth of Neutrality

Jada Watson

The 1990s are usually described as a period in which women achieved an increased presence in the Country music market after decades of underrepresentation. While SoundScan data revealed that their share of the sales-generated album market had increased from 19% in 1994 to 43% by 1997 (Flippo 1997), singles by women captured just 33% of the radio-driven Hot Country Singles chart. By 2005, songs by women returned to pre-SoundScan era levels of 21% of the radio-driven Singles chart, their decline in the market becoming a central issue in mainstream discourse (Watson 2019).

Drawing on Billboard data from 1985 to 2015, this paper reconsiders representation on the weekly Singles charts against the backdrop of the organization’s adoption of SoundScan technology and changes in methodology. Touted as neutral in design, SoundScan technology was believed to offer an accurate reflection of music consumption (Anand & Peterson 2001). In reality, it placed greater control of the market in the hands of radio program directors, who were by the 1990s influencing how labels signed and produced artists (Negus 1996). This was exacerbated with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated ownership and resulted in centralized programming that limited opportunities for women at radio, ultimately impacting sales-generated revenue. Influenced by data feminist principles of intersectionality (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020; Collins 1990), this paper challenges the long-held notion of “neutrality” in the technology underpinning industry charts showing how methodological changes disadvantaged minoritized artists in the Country market, damaging the careers of women in the mainstream industry.

“Why Did I Have to Leave Home Just to Hear You Say My Name?”: Queer Reframings of Nostalgia in Bluegrass Lyricism

Emily Williams Roberts

Bluegrass lyricism is well known for a consistent set of tropes: love, loss, home and religion. Prominently written from the perspective of a man who has left his rural home to work in the urban city, traditional bluegrass standards enact what Boym (2007; 2008) terms “reflective nostalgia” through a heteronormative lens; the writer reminisces and romanticizes their past life in comparison to their current perspective, recognizing that the past cannot be fully recreated or relived either due to the passing of time or changes in society. Only through the possibility of a heavenly reunion can said past be restored. However, bluegrass is not a static genre, and the songwriters of today blend their current experiences into the tropes of the past. Through both lyrical analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine the songwriting of today’s queer bluegrass artists who reframe reflective nostalgia, recognizing that the “old home place” is not always a place of acceptance, love and loss is influenced by discrimination, and religion can be a topic of hurt rather than hope. Nostalgia, rather than abandoned, is queered. Examining this queering of nostalgia in bluegrass at a variety of levels, from the local jam session to the professional recording studio, I demonstrate that these queer songwriters extend and expand on the traditional bluegrass canon, rather than separating from it.