Beyoncé Is Likely Not Surprised by the 2024 CMA Awards Snub—She Basically Predicted It

In April, Beyoncé became the first Black woman artist to reach the number one spot on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart with her eighth solo studio album, Cowboy Carter. According to the Country Music Association’s written standards, the timing of that release would make it eligible for the album-of-the-year prize at the 2024 CMA Awards on November 20. When the CMA released its nominations on Monday, the picks for the category included some of the genre’s biggest names, including Kacey Musgraves, Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton, Jelly Roll, and Cody Johnson. But Cowboy Carter didn’t make the cut, and its lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em,” which occupied the top spot on the Hot Country Songs chart for 10 weeks, didn’t make the list.

However, Shaboozey, one of Beyoncé’s collaborators on the album, received nominations for the first time. “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which is still at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, received a nod for single of the year, and the singer-songwriter is in the running for new artist of the year alongside other breakout stars including Megan Moroney, Mitchell Tenpenny, and Bailey Zimmerman. In a social media post following the nominations announcement, Shaboozey made reference to the impact Beyoncé has had on the genre. “That goes without saying,” he wrote. “Thank you @Beyonce for opening a door for us, starting a conversation, and giving us one of the most innovative country albums of all time!”

The exclusion of Cowboy Carter has caused a stir, but Beyoncé’s comments prior to the album’s release might have presaged this: More than five years ago, she started working on music with country roots. “It was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” she wrote. “But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.” (A representative for Beyoncé did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s questions about the CMAs.)

Fans and critics widely interpreted that remark as a veiled reference to her experience performing with the Chicks at the CMA Awards in November 2016, days before that year’s election. Though some of the genre’s stars praised her for joining the band onstage, attendees later said audience members booed her. At least one fellow musician made complaints, which some perceived as having clear racist undertones, that a pop star had taken the spotlight from the genre’s stalwarts. Meanwhile, on the CMA’s Facebook page, a number of commenters attacked the organization for including Beyoncé, noting her history of speaking out against police violence.

In comments to TMZ about this year’s nominations, the singer’s father, Mathew Knowles, said he thought the CMA never apologized to Beyoncé after her experience in 2016. Ultimately, the organization’s decision to overlook Cowboy Carter makes sense “in the current state of American culture,” he added. “There’s more white people in America, and unfortunately they don’t vote based on ability and achievements. It’s still sometimes a white-and-Black thing.”

Founded in the late 1950s, the CMA is a Nashville-based trade association with categories for members across the industry, including artists, publishers, managers, record labels, radio representatives, trade publications, and composers, and it tends to reflect the conventional wisdom on the city’s Music Row. Voting members must be “professionals who work full-time and earn their income primarily from the country music industry” as part of one of those groups. Though the CMA has some public eligibility rules, nominations for the CMA Awards, a.k.a. “Country Music’s Biggest Night,” can seem opaque. The association’s more than 6,000 members submit nominations via emailed ballots, which those members then narrow down the candidates in a second round.

Frustration with its choices is nothing new, and in 1964 a group including musicians and club owners in California founded what would become the Academy of Country Music, with the intent of promoting the genre and providing support to artists on the West Coast. In the modern era, judgments about genre have continued to be a concern. In 2021, Musgraves released Star-Crossed, an album that moved away from traditional country music instrumentation, though the songwriting was not too dissimilar from that of her 2018 album, Golden Hour, which won album of the year at the CMAs. Not too long after the release of Star-Crossed, the Recording Academy’s country screening committee decided that it would be entered as a pop album for the purposes of the 2022 Grammy Awards, and it was instead accepted by the pop screening committee.

The Grammys’ decisions have no bearing on the country-genre groups, and the CMA never made a similar announcement. Still, Musgraves, a former favorite of the group, was missing from the nominations list the following year. Three years after that release, her newest album, Deeper Well, features more folk inspirations, and it received a nomination for this year’s awards.

In an interview for GQ’s October cover story, Beyoncé said that genre lines and rules have never been of great importance to her. “From the start of my career and on every album, I have always mixed genres. Whether it is R&B, dance, country, rap, zydeco, blues, opera, gospel, they have all influenced me in some way,” she said. “I have favorite artists from every genre you could think about. I believe genres are traps that box us in and separate us. I’ve experienced this for 25 years in the music industry. Black artists, and other artists of color, have been creating and mastering multiple genres since forever.”