Tanner Adell I fell in love with country music when I was young.
She grew up splitting her time between Los Angeles and Star Valley, WY, which created a stark contrast, but it was the country lifestyle, and specifically the music, that kept her heart. Adell remembers falling in love with Keith Urban when he released “Somebody Like You. And every summer, when she and her mom would leave to drive back to Los Angeles from Star Valley, she would sit in the back of the car and “silently cry as we started this road trip back to California,” she recalls.
These days, Adell is a rising country music star. And ever since Beyoncé released “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” on Super Bowl Sunday and announced her upcoming country album, the spotlight has been on black country artists like her. A lot of that attention has been positive; Adell and others say they’re incredibly excited about what this will mean for the genre. But it’s also been a bit controversial. After an Oklahoma radio station refused to play Beyoncé because “it’s a country music station,” an online uproar convinced the station to reverse its decision – and ignited a broader conversation about inclusion within the genre.
On March 19, Beyoncé announced that “Act II: Cowboy Carter” will be released on March 29. In an Instagram post, she talked about what it means to be a black woman in the countryside. “This album has been in the works for over five years. It was born out of an experience I had years ago where I didn’t feel welcome… and it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I delved into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive. It feels good to see how music can bring so many people together around the world, while amplifying the voices of some of the people who have dedicated so much of their lives to educating about our musical history,” she wrote. “The criticism I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to overcome the limitations that were imposed on me. act II is the result of challenging myself and taking my time to bend and mix genres to create this body of work.”
“Country music is how you feel, it’s your story, it’s a part of you.”
In fact, for other black artists like Adell, pursuing country music often transcends the difficulty that might come with navigating her identity in a genre dominated by white men. As she says, “Country music is how you feel, it’s your story, it’s part of you.”
The same was true for Tiera Kennedy when she started writing songs in high school. She was a huge Taylor Swift fan at the time, and she just fell into expressing herself through gender. “I always say I don’t feel like I found country music, I feel like country music found me,” she tells POPSUGAR. “When I started making music, it just came out that way. I was writing what was going on at the time, which was children’s drama. And I fell in love with everything related to country music and just immersed myself in it.”
Moving to Nashville seven years ago was “a big deal” for Kennedy in terms of developing his career: “Everyone told me that if you want to be in country music, you have to be in Nashville.”When she got there, she was surprised that others in the industry welcomed her so well, which doesn’t necessarily happen for everyone, given how close-knit the city can be. “I was super grateful and blessed to have met so many people from the beginning who opened the doors to me without asking for anything in return,” Kennedy says.
For Adell, too, moving to the “country music capital” almost three years ago was a huge career boost. And an essential part of that has been finding a community of other black female artists. “Oh, we have a group chat,” he jokes. “We support each other a lot, and I think sometimes people try to pit us against each other or even pit us against Beyoncé, but you’re not going to have that fight or that drama.”
“Country is as much a part of the fabric of black culture as hip-hop is.”
But while these artists have been able to foster a strong community within Nashville, it’s no secret that country music has faced a reckoning when it comes to racism and sexism. Chart-topping artists like Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen have recently weaponized racism as a marketing tool, by NPR. In September, Maren Morris said she was distancing herself from the genre for some of these reasons. “After the Trump years, people’s prejudices were in plain sight”, she told the Los Angeles Times. “It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic, racist, homophobic and transphobic.”
But the reality is that black artists have always been part of the founding of the country. As Prana Supreme Diggs, who performs with her mother, Tekitha, as O.N.E the Duo – he says, “Black Americans, so much of our history has its roots in the South. Country is as much a part of the fabric of black culture as hip-hop is.”
Diggs grew up in California watching his mother, a Wu-Tang Clan vocalist, organize jam sessions at her house. She has wanted to perform professionally with her mother since she was a teenager, but it was not until the beginning of the pandemic that they really committed to their joint country project.
For Diggs, there has been nothing but excitement since the Beyoncé commercial appeared during the Super Bowl. He immediately ran to his computer to listen to the songs. “And the moment the instrumental for ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ came on, I thought, oh my God, it’s happening,” she says. “We are finally here.”
Tekitha felt the same way. “In the black and rural community, we’ve really been needing a champion,” she says. “We’ve been needing someone who can slam the door open and recognize that our voice is important in this genre.”
Adell says that given how iconic Beyoncé is, the criticism she’s received says a lot about how far the country has yet to go. “For her to have given so much of herself to the world and when she decides to have a little change of style to not just get support, I don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t understand why people don’t say, ‘This is great, Beyoncé is going to release a country album!'”
Kennedy tries to focus on the positives of the industry (if she’s excluded from one opportunity, for example, she won’t stop, she’ll just look for the next one), but being a black woman in America will always come with systemic challenges. “No, it hasn’t always been easy,” she says. “There are so many layers added to that – being a new artist, being a woman, being black in country music. But I think if I focused on how hard that is, I’d fall in love with country music.”
That positive thinking has been paying off. After the Super Bowl, Kennedy threw a cover of “Texas Hold ‘Em”, and it went viral. After she posted the video, new fans logged into her direct messages and told her that they didn’t even know that her kind of country existed, that it’s steeped in R&B. It’s something that other black country stars are echoing – that the new focus on their contributions to the genre has been coming for a long time, and a great opportunity.
“I’m super grateful that Beyoncé is breaking into this genre and bringing this whole audience with her,” Kennedy says. “And hopefully that will bring out some of the artists that have been in the city for a long time and working hard. I don’t think there’s anyone better than Beyoncé to do it.”
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