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In Oklahoma, a small country music station that rejected a listener’s request to play a new Beyoncé song was forced to change its tune after an uproar from fans who say black artists are too often excluded from the genre. .
On Tuesday morning, Justin McGowan requested that the DJs at KYKC, a country music radio station in Ada, play “Texas Hold’em” one of two new songs Beyoncé released as announced in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday.
Beyoncé, who grew up in Houston, sings about hoedowns, and the vibrant song also features another Black Grammy winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on banjo and viola.
The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a terse rejection: “We don’t play Beyoncé on KYKC because we are a country music station.” By sending the email, Harris unknowingly lit a new flame in a long-simmering debate about how black artists fit into a genre that has black music at its roots.
In the Super Bowl ad, Beyoncé joked that her new release would “break the internet.” She wasn’t joking.
McGowan posted a screenshot of the rejection on social media and tagged a group of Beyoncé fans in a post that attracted 3.4 million views on X and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok.
“This is absolutely ridiculous and racist,” McGowan wrote, urging people to email the station and request the song.
Fans bombarded KYKC with hundreds of emails and phone calls, criticizing the station for not playing the song, according to Harris, the station’s manager for 48 years.
“I’ve never experienced anything in my career like the amount of communications we received in support of the song,” he said in an interview.
Between calls and emails from angry Beyoncé fans, Harris said the station scrambled to get a high-quality version of “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which DJs played three times in Tuesday night’s rotation.
Beyoncé’s new songs appear on an upcoming album she called “Act II,” part of a three-volume project that music critics say is about reclaiming black roots in popular music.
Mr. Harris said he was not aware of that project. He said the radio network, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation, regularly plays Beyoncé on its top 40 and adult hit stations.
“We haven’t played her on our country station because she’s not a country artist,” he said. “Well, now I guess she wants to be, and we’re all for it.”
Harris said his rotation is guided by where a song appears on the charts and which stations it plays on.
This wasn’t the first time the genre’s arbiters questioned Beyoncé’s credentials in country music.
When the star submitted his 2016 song “Daddy Lessons” from the album “Lemonade” for a Grammy in the country category, the Recording Academy’s country music committee rejected it. The Associated Press reported at the time. (Beyoncé brought rodeo chic to the Renaissance World Tour and this year’s Grammys, sporting a white cowgirl hat and a Louis Vuitton leather suit.) Some fans responded to her live performance of “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks at the Country Music Awards with disdain, arguing that she didn’t belong at the ceremony.
Billboard’s 2019 removal of hip-hop artist Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the country chart sparked a debate about what constitutes country music and how race affects the conversation.
The Black Opry, a social media hub for Black artists and Black fans of country, blues, folk and Americana, used the radio station controversy involving Beyoncé to direct its online fans to its lists playback on Spotify with Other black artists in country music..
Charles Hughes, director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College, said the Oklahoma radio station’s initial firing of Beyoncé symbolized how “country radio has systematically excluded artists of color,” particularly women. women.
But if anyone can break down barriers in the country, Dr. Hughes said, it’s Beyoncé and her fans, known as the BeyHive.
“Maybe that power will create an expanded space for all these great black women making country music,” she said, “so that it’s more in line with the people who love country music and the country it’s supposed to represent.”