A decade ago this month, the 50th CMA Awards booked one of the most talked about, and arguably one of the most powerful, performances in the history of broadcast. Alongside a New Orleans second-line style band, Beyoncé joined the Chicks for a rendition
of her track “Daddy Lessons” — which featured an interpolation of the country trio’s “Long Time Gone” — off her masterpiece Lemonade.
Ten years later, the performance’s impact still reverberates, and so does the impression that the country music industry left on Beyoncé, the most awarded musician in Grammy history.
It was an electric performance for many overt reasons, but especially for two stories happening behind the scenes: “Daddy Lessons” was about to be deemed ineligible for contention in the country categories at the Grammy Awards by the Recording Academy; and the Chicks hadn’t appeared on the CMA broadcast since they were expunged from the country music industry in 2003. With the banjo and fiddle on high and the foursome hard stamping their Lone Star roots with proclamations of “Texas!” the collab should have screamed “country” to anyone watching. Instead, it resulted in a sour experience that led to Beyoncé making Act II: Cowboy Carter, her exploration and reclaiming of American roots traditions.
Much was made of how Beyoncé introduced that now Grammy-winning body of work: posting on Instagram that Cowboy Carter “ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” But why would she claim a genre that wouldn’t claim her?
Controversy, if you can call it that, followed the performance. Alan Jackson reportedly walked out, and cameras captured some stone-cold faces in the crowd. Many argued that Beyoncé — singing a murder ballad that mentions the Second Amendment, no less — wasn’t country enough. But that wasn’t exactly a solid case to make when the genre, and the awards, openly embraced plenty of white pop collaborations. Just the year before, Justin Timberlake joined Chris Stapleton for a show-stopping highlight, and since then everyone from Katy Perry to Post Malone have taken the stage.
“The problem was not even that Beyoncé is Black, or at least, not only that Beyoncé is Black,” the author and musician Karen Pittelman wrote in her essay “Another Country.” “The real problem was that, with the release of Lemonade and in particular the first single ‘Formation,’ Beyoncé had recently made a clear political statement and aligned herself with the Black Lives Matter movement. Of course, Beyoncé knew all this — is there anything Beyoncé doesn’t know? — and I think that’s why she positioned herself with the Chicks in her performance. There was no place in country music’s construction of pro-establishment whiteness for Beyoncé’s vision.”
Five years later, when Beyoncé released “Texas Hold ‘Em,” that same establishment kept its doors shut. Country radio did not embrace the song, despite it rising to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. But its reach remains undeniable: In 2026, country music saw another song with Texas in the title go on to become the most popular of all time. Still, the industry doesn’t recognize Beyoncé for helping introduce country sounds to new listeners, essentially priming them for what Ella Langley had in store.
Because remember, at the beginning of her 2016 CMAs performance, Beyoncé made one thing very clear: She was choosin’ Texas. But like the Chicks before her, the country music industry didn’t choose her back.
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