Awards
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The 2025 edition of Clive Davis’ annual Pre-Grammy Gala — held Feb. 1 at The Beverly Hilton — had special meaning this year. The star-studded soiree transitioned into a fundraiser while celebrating a special milestone. “This year marks the 50th anniversary of this incredible night, but this one is a little different,” said Harvey Mason […]
Kai Cenat had a great time at the Grammys and now he seems to be buddies with Jay-Z. The popular streamer recapped his experience on Twitch and talked about meeting Jay-Z and Beyoncé for the first time. “I go up to Jay, I say, ‘What’s up, bro?’” Cenat said before giving their oldest daughter a […]
Ye says he and his wife Bianca Censori one-upped the Grammys. In since-deleted Instagram posts, Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) shared a screenshot of Google stats that show Censori was searched more than the awards show itself. He then followed that up with a post proclaiming, “We beat the Grammies [sic]” and another saying, […]
The Grammys telecast is all about music, but on the red carpet in the hours leading up to the ceremony, it’s all about the fashion. And the 2025 awards were no exception, with the industry’s biggest names all gathering in their most dazzling gowns and suits at Crypto.com Arena on Sunday evening (Feb. 2) before […]
Kacey Musgraves is stopping false rumors in their tracks regarding her reaction to Beyoncé‘s best country album win at the 2025 Grammys. The “Rainbow” singer and Bey were two of several artists nominated for best country album at the awards show Sunday, for Deeper Well and Cowboy Carter, respectively. Ultimately, the prize went to the […]
Lady Gaga has added yet another Grammy Award to her collection. The superstar notched her 14th Grammy on Sunday night (Feb. 2) after her Bruno Mars collaboration, “Die With a Smile,” won best pop duo/group performance. The win also marks Mars’ 16th Grammy. To celebrate, Gaga took to Instagram on Tuesday (Feb. 4) to share […]
Beyoncé made history Sunday night (Feb. 2) when Cowboy Carter won the Grammy for best country album, making the superstar the first Black artist to win in the category since it was reintroduced in 1995, after a nearly three-decade absence.
Earlier in the evening, she also captured the award for best country duo/group performance for “II Most Wanted” with Miley Cyrus, which was the first time a Black lead artist had won that award since The Pointer Sisters in 1975. Bey capped the evening by winning the night’s biggest prize, album of the year, an honor that had previously eluded her during her 25-year career as a member of Destiny’s Child and a solo artist, despite winning more Grammys than anyone in history.
Many in the country music community are applauding Beyoncé’s country wins and hope they will help lift up other Black artists in country music today, many of whom have been unable to get a foothold on radio or gain much traction within the genre.
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Beyoncé’s wins for best country album and album of the year are overall wins for country music, says Big Machine Label Group founder/president/CEO Scott Borchetta. “Beyoncé made a brilliant album that was absolutely worthy of album of the year,” he says. “Every event and moment like this is a move forward and continues to widen the aperture and acceptance of what country music is and can be.”
Willie “Prophet” Stiggers, co-founder of the Black Music Action Coalition, agrees, telling Billboard: “Cowboy Carter pushed country music’s genre redlining into the public zeitgeist – but as Beyoncé herself has mentioned, Black artists and writers have been pushing against Music Row’s gates for decades. Cowboy Carter is such a powerful body of work that it finally broke some long-held barriers. [Recording Academy CEO] Harvey Mason jr. and the academy also deserve acknowledgement for working intentionally to foster a younger, more diverse voting membership, which helped to bring some of those barriers down. However, it’s important that the industry – and Music Row specifically – understand that this moment, this album, is a beginning, not a destination. … ‘Genre’ is still too often used as coded language for race, and it’s far past time for that to change.”
Others see Beyoncé’s win as an isolated victory. “I love that Beyoncé won for best country album and [album of the year] for Cowboy Carter last night at the Grammys, but it’s a win for Beyonce, not necessarily for Black artists in country music,” says Cameo Carlson, CEO of artist development/management services company Mtheory and manager of Black country singer Mickey Guyton, who received three Grammy nominations at the 2022 Grammy Awards but took home none.
“The fact that Beyonce’s album wasn’t even nominated for other Nashville or country-centric awards, like the CMA Awards, is indicative of the work that still needs to be done in Nashville and in country music,” Carlson continues. “The Grammys are a global award for all intents and purpose; the hardcore country awards — and the large body of people that make up the voting bloc for those awards — did not embrace Beyonce or Cowboy Carter, decrying [the album] as ‘not really country’ or making the excuse that she didn’t ‘play the Nashville game’ by coming and investing time in the country music community or in Nashville.”
Beyonce had already rewritten the country rulebook with the album before her Grammy victories. Following its March 29, 2024, release, Cowboy Carter debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, making her the first Black woman to reach the pinnacle, dating back to the chart’s January 1964 inception. She also became the first Black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart with “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which stayed at the top for 10 weeks. However, the song peaked at No. 33 on the Country Airplay chart.
While, as Carlson mentions, there had been much talk about the Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter not receiving a CMA Award nomination for album of the year (or any CMA Award nominations), such an occurrence is hardly rare. There have been more than a dozen records that have won the Grammy for best country album since the Recording Academy brought the category back in 1995 that did not receive a CMA nomination for album of the year, much less a win, including Shania Twain’s The Woman in Me (1996), the then-named Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces (1999) and Tanya Tucker’s While I’m Living (2020). The Grammy voters tend to nominate a wider variety of albums, often including legends who no longer receive commercial airplay, artists who belong to the broader country genre but aren’t in the mainstream, or artists who don’t necessarily, as Carlson said, “play the game.” (In addition to Cowboy Carter, the only country album to win the all-genre Grammy for album of the year and not receive a CMA nomination is The Chicks’ Taking the Long Way in 2006, which came out after much of the country community disavowed the trio for comments Natalie Maines made about then-President George Bush.)
The CMA declined to comment for this story.
Scott Stem, manager for Scotty McCreery at Triple 8 Management, doesn’t see the disparity as a bad thing. “I don’t think all the awards have to be the same — one artist can win the Grammy, one artist can win the CMA Award, one artist can win the ACM Award, and one artist can win the American Music Award,” he says. “It only widens the pot if more artists and their work are recognized instead of it being the same artists on each show.”
Unlike the CMA and ACM Awards, which draw from primarily the country community and may include industry members not involved in the creative process such as radio executives as voters, the 13,000 Grammy voters come from all genres and must be involved in the creative music-making process. Grammy voters are allowed to vote in up to 10 categories across three fields in addition to the General Field categories, meaning that non-country voters could choose to vote in the country field in order to support Beyoncé. Beyoncé won none of the other Grammys she was nominated for in such genre fields as pop, rap or Americana, possibly indicating that non-country voters were inclined to vote for her in country but not spend their limited votes for her in other areas.
Not everyone felt the win was deserved, with some questioning whether the album belonged in the country category at all after Beyoncé herself said in March, “This ain’t a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album.” But there was no denying its homage to country’s Black roots with the inclusion of Black country pioneer Linda Martell and country’s history with the participation of Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, as well as a nod to its future by including rising Black country artists like Shaboozey, Willie Jones, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts.
Big & Rich’s John Rich posited in a post on X that her win was a result of Sony Music swaying the vote, instead of merit. “Folks are asking me ‘how do music award shows work?’” Rich wrote. “Labels/publishers all have blocks of votes. They make deals with each other ‘you vote for mine, we’ll vote for yours’ type thing. It has ZERO to do with who made the best music, thus, Beyonce with ‘Country album of the year.’ Nice, right? The same thing is true with the CMA’s, ACM’s, Billboard, etc…all work exactly the same. Last night, the Grammy’s [sic] outed themselves in a big way.” [Editor’s note: The Billboard Music Awards are determined solely by Billboard chart performance, not a voting body.]
As the current presidential administration erases diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, many of which came to be following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, some hope Beyoncé’s win will show Nashville that listeners want to hear from more than the white men who dominate country music, especially mainstream country radio.
“Beyoncé will move on and make another killer Beyoncé record in any genre she wants to, while Black and non-white country artists will continue to struggle to be heard and supported,” Carlson says. “Labels and the country infrastructure need to continue to invest in these artists, need to continue to invest in DEI programs, and support programs like Equal Access that are out here doing the work every day to make sure that Beyoncé is only the first Black artist to win a country album of the year Grammy, but certainly not the last.”
Beverly Keel, dean of Middle Tennessee State University’s College of Media and Entertainment, says all eyes will now be on the May 8 ACM Awards, for which first-round voting started Feb. 1 and ends Feb. 18. “I hope Nashville will now fully embrace the project,” Keel says. “This international superstar is taking her wonderful representation of country music around the world, introducing it to people who haven’t listened to the genre before. I hope the next Black female artist doesn’t have to be as successful as Beyoncé to have a big country album. I hope this is the beginning and not an anomaly.”
—Assistance on this story provided by Jessica Nicholson
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When Captain Sheila Kelliher Berkoh announced Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter as the winner of album of the year at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards (Feb. 2), the rapturous standing ovation that swept across Crypto.com Arena seemed to say one thing: Finally.
After five previous bids over the past decade and a half, Beyoncé finally took home album of the year for the second history-making entry in her still-unfurling trilogy that commenced with 2022’s Grammy-winning Renaissance. As Queen Bey embraced her eldest daughter, Blue Ivy Carter (already a Grammy winner in her own right), and began to make her way to the stage, the room rejoiced. Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish wept, Cynthia Erivo leapt up and down, Taylor Swift shared a toast with Jay-Z, Olivia Rodrigo cheered and GloRilla screamed till she damn near couldn’t anymore. At long last, the First Lady of Music – as dubbed by one Clive Davis – had finally won the industry’s most coveted prize.
With her victory, Beyoncé not only extended her lead as the most-awarded artist in Grammy history (35 wins), but she also joined Natalie Cole (Unforgettable With Love, 1992), Whitney Houston (The Bodyguard, 1994) and Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 1999) as just the fourth Black woman to ever win album of the year. It’s that nugget of history, coupled with her litany of egregious General Field snubs that made this moment such a sweet one to witness.
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But let’s be careful not to let “overdue” narratives completely obfuscate the artistic merit of Cowboy Carter. Leading up to last night’s ceremony, many publications – including Billboard – predicted that Cowboy Carter would take home top honors. Across social media and some of those pieces, narrative started to build that a Cowboy Carter victory would be like Leonardo DiCaprio winning for The Revenant or Martin Scorsese winning for The Departed – or like Beck winning for Morning Phase in 2015, the year of Bey’s first major album of the year loss. After being passed over for what many consider to be their best efforts, acclaimed artists who consistently produce the best work in their respective industries finally earn the highest honors in their field. In the same way that DiCaprio is an actor’s actor and Scorsese is a director’s director, Beyoncé is an artist’s artist. That much was clear when the 2023 Grammys turned into a Bey pseudo-meet-and-greet, and the room’s ecstatic reaction to her victory last night was another reminder. As far as many are concerned, Cowboy Carter’s win is equivalent to a lifetime achievement award; a mea culpa of sorts for snubs of years past.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that framing, but it does belie the fact that Cowboy Carter would have deserved to win whether it was Bey’s first album of the year nod or her tenth. Less than two years after flipping the dance-pop world on its head with Renaissance, a record that illuminated the Black queer roots of dance music and culture, Beyoncé strutted into yet another new genre and made it completely her own, while venerating some of its most respected (and overlooked) pioneers.
She opened the album with “Ameriican Requiem,” a Buffalo Springfield-nodding tour de force that served as a musical funeral for not just the most limiting visions of America, but also the overwhelmingly white country music establishment that unfairly made themselves the gatekeepers of who can lay claim to country music, aesthetics and identity. Over the 26 subsequent tracks, she assumed and illustrated different Western motifs and characters (the sheriff, the damsel in distress, the outlaw, etc.), ending with “Amen,” an anthem of hope for a new, limitless vision of America that interpolates the album opener.
Cowboy Carter reaped a whopping 11 nominations across several different genres, a point she emphasized with the brilliant three-track run of “Jolene,” “Daughter” and “Spaghettii.” With her reimagining of Dolly Parton’s classic, Beyoncé turned the country icon’s desperation into a fierce understanding of self-worth that simultaneously aligned her existing musical and lyrical brand with Parton’s track, while also serving as a callback to the “Becky” character that haunted 2016’s Lemonade, which infamously lost album of the year to Adele’s chart-conquering 25. “Jolene” gives way to “Daughter,” a positively stunning take on the country murder ballad that finds Beyoncé ripping through an operatic rendition of “Caro Mi Ben” in the original Italian before recruiting Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry, and Shaboozey, the man who would come to be the voice behind the longest-running solo Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single in history (“A Bar Song”), for “Spaghettii.” Nominated for best melodic rap performance last night, “Spaghettii” mines the cross-cultural history of spaghetti westerns to create a folk-inflected trap heater assisted by a Brazilian funk sample (O Mandrake’s “Aquecimento das Danadas”). And that’s just the first half of the LP!
There’s also “Alliigator Tears,” on which Bey is seemingly singing directly to the Recording Academy. “You say move a mountain/ And I’ll throw on my boots/ You say stop the river from runnin’/ I’ll build a dam or two/ You say change religions/ Now, I spend Sundays with you/ Somethin’ ’bout those tears of yours/ How does it feel to be adored?” she posits in the chorus. Of course, there’s also the rising contemporary Black country talent she highlighted across the album (Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Willie Jones, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy), and let’s not forget her Jersey club flip of Patsy Cline’s seminal “I Fall to Pieces” either. We don’t even have to get into the historic chart achievements of the era or the cultural impact it had across fashion and business – Cowboy Carter is worthy enough based solely on its 27 gorgeous songs.
Not a single one of the other nominees for album of the year boasts the archival ambition, depth of research, courage, experimentation, soul and sheer scope of Cowboy Carter. The album is closer to a master’s thesis than a standard pop album, but it’s also relentlessly fun. Whether she’s going full Western camp on “Tyrant,” crafting a friendship anthem for the ages alongside Miley Cyrus on “II Most Wanted” or blazing through a crash course in rock ‘n’ roll history on “Ya Ya,” Cowboy Carter is a blast. The record received some flak for its length and people considering it a “chore” to sit through because of how heady it can get at certain points; Cowboy Carter, in some circles, became something to be respected, but not enjoyed. In reality, Beyoncé crafted the album with so much verve that there really isn’t a way for Cowboy Carter to not be the ultimate hoedown. Is it Beyoncé’s best album? Depending on the day, maybe. Is it frustrating that the Recording Academy couldn’t reward her for making paradigm-shifting music in her home genre of R&B? Unequivocally. But none of that makes Cowboy Carter underserving of its victory in the 2025 album of the year race.
There’s a reason the album collected two other wins last night, just like how The Departed and The Revenant won additional Oscars outside of Scorsese and DiCaprio. Their victories may have been delayed, but they still triumphed for excellent and deserving work. Pity wins those were not. Yes, this win is a vindication of her past losses, a tribute to her towering career, and a nod to the Black women before her who were denied time and time again, but above all, it’s a win for Cowboy Carter specifically – and that’s the most important takeaway from last night.