Country Music Awards Snub Beyoncé for That Guy. You Know the One.

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 9, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 9, 2024 |

Despite releasing one of the year’s best-selling country albums, Cowboy Carter, with one of the year’s best-selling country singles, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the Country Music Awards want nothing to do with Beyoncé. Instead, the number one nominee for the 2024 ceremony is Morgan Wallen, the guy who got caught saying the N-word on camera. He has seven nominations.

The colossal nature of this snub isn’t a matter of opinion. Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Cowboy Carter made history this year when it spent four weeks on top of Billboard’s Top Country albums chart—making her the first Black woman to achieve that feat. She also became the first Black woman to hit the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot country songs chart with ‘Texas Hold ‘Em,’ which held the top position for a whopping 10 weeks.” She had country music greats like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson featured on tracks, as well as current nominees like Post Malone.

None of this is a coincidence. Cowboy Carter was, of course, “born out of an experience” Beyoncé had at the 2016 CMAs, when she brought other country music establishment outlaws, The Chicks, onstage with her for a surprise performance of her song “Daddy Lessons.”

“I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” she wrote in an Instagram caption teasing the album. “But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.” That deep dive she refers to, bolstered by her collaboration with Shaboozey—who has been nominated this year for his “A Bar Song (Typsy)”—sparked a wider conversation about Black musical artists “reclaiming the genres they started, including country music.”

For all of this to be true and yet ignored in favor of the drunken, bigoted mess that is Morgan Wallen solidifies the stratification of the genre and proves the point of artists like Beyoncé, The Chicks, Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves, and more, who refuse to be held to old fashioned, right-wing standards.