The Country Music Association announced its nominees for the 58th Annual Country Music Association Awards, with one notable absence. Cowboy Carter, the country-coded Beyoncé album whose lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em,” was a Billboard Hot Country No. 1, received zero nominations. Instead, multi-CMA winners Morgan Wallen, Cody Johnson, and Chris Stapleton once again lead the pack ahead of the November 20 ceremony in Nashville. In addition, some of Beyoncé’s collaborators, namely Post Malone and Shaboozey, received nominations, just not for their work on Cowboy Carter.
So far, there is no clue as to whether Beyoncé submitted her music for consideration. In recent years, artists including Drake and the Weeknd have snubbed the Grammy Awards, citing institutional bias, and Beyoncé’s friction with the CMAs is no secret. She alluded to it when explaining the impetus for Cowboy Carter, writing, in March, that the album “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.”
The line was widely interpreted as a nod to the 2016 CMAs, where her performance of “Daddy Lessons,” with the Chicks, prompted a backlash drastically greater than any that met other pop stars, like Justin Timberlake a year earlier. “Because of that experience,” Beyoncé added in her March note, “I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.”
Despite the song’s broad success, “Texas Hold ’Em” received little airplay on country radio, and the album’s Dolly Parton cover, “Jolene,” met a similar fate. The apparent CMAs snub lines up with the perception—noted by Beyoncé herself, and explored in the discourse that exploded around the album—that country music gatekeepers wish to make its institutions exclusive clubs, unwelcoming to outsiders and particularly to Black women.
Representatives for neither the CMAs nor Beyoncé responded to requests for more information.
