For all her declarations of being authentically country, Cowboy Carter arrives on the back of booming business for the genre and is all about the star, not the roots music supposedly at the project’s heart

On the first track of Beyoncé ’s new album, she seems to state the impetus behind the project: “They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough.” That rejection was an unnamed experience in which she has said she “did not feel welcomed”, assumed to be her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music awards. It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment, as well as outrage at Beyoncé giving a platform to the Chicks, who had been in exile from the industry since singer Natalie Maines criticised George W Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in 2002.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s 27-track response. On the album’s cover, she is on a horse, holding an American flag, draped in US flag apparel, with her long blond tresses flowing and a cowboy hat atop her head. In the few details she has shared about the album, she said she “did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive”. As she became the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1 and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song and debate over her place in the genre reigned, no greater a country luminary than Dolly Parton lent her support. Later it was revealed that she and outlaw legend Willie Nelson were to feature on the album, cementing its country bona fides.

(Parkwood/Columbia)
Straying far beyond its original country concept, the musician’s eighth album straddles the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the blues – and Becky with the Good Hair via Dolly Parton’s Jolene

American Requiem, the opening track of Beyoncé’s eighth studio album, is many things. It offers a touch of state-of-the-nation address – “Can we stand for something? Now is the time to face the wind” – and a sprinkling of the kind of vague but apparently personal lyrics that send social media into a frenzy of decoding: what are her “father’s sins” that Beyoncé has apparently “cleansed” herself of? Who are the “fairweather friends” for whom she claims to be planning “a funeral”?

It’s also a loud statement of what you might call Beyoncé’s bona fides. She is, she avers, “the grandbaby of a moonshine man [from] Gadsden, Alabama” who furthermore has roots in Louisiana. “They used to say I spoke too country,” she protests, adding: “What could be more country than that?”