When Beyoncé confirmed that she would be going all-in on country music with “Cowboy Carter,” the second part of a project that began with her 2022 album “Renaissance,” conversation about pop artists turning to the genre — and how Black artists are received in Nashville — began to heat up.
Country remains a cloistered segment of the music industry where Black performers continue to face an especially challenging path — despite the fact that Black pioneers have been essential to the genre, including Lesley Riddle, known as Esley, a guitarist and folklorist who taught the Carter Family in the 1930s and Charley Pride, who scored more than 50 Top 10 country hits from the 1960s through the ’80s.
In the past few years, Lil Nas X sparked cultural debate and hit chart gold with “Old Town Road,” a country-rap mash-up that was followed by the arrival of Breland’s aesthetic blend “My Truck,” and songs from O.N.E the Duo, a mother-daughter group making a hybrid of country, R&B and pop. But there’s also a long history of Black artists embracing country after establishing careers in other genres. Here’s how some key figures fared.
Ray Charles’s passion for country music dated back to childhood, when his mother would let him stay up late on Saturdays and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. As he told Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” in 1998, “it was fascinating what these guys could do with these banjos and these fiddles and the steel guitars.”
When he tried his hand at the genre, with “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” in 1962, he mostly did away with those surface trappings, instead reimagining country favorites from the prior decade-plus as affecting, pop-crooner fare. Focusing on lovelorn ballads, including Eddy Arnold and Cindy Walker’s “You Don’t Know Me,” Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and Hank Williams’s “You Win Again,” Charles elegantly conveyed the wistful ache at the heart of these songs, his voice framed by sumptuous orchestral arrangements.
It was a brilliant concept that paid off in sales: The album topped the Billboard pop chart and its second volume, released later the same year, hit No. 2. In subsequent years, amid his steady work in pop, R&B and jazz, Charles would return to country music regularly, on albums such as “Love Country Style” (1970) and “Wish You Were Here Tonight” (1983), where he openly paid homage to his roots by incorporating the banjos, fiddles and steel guitars he’d first heard decades earlier.
An entire album themed around country music wasn’t a huge stretch for Tina Turner. “The music I heard on the radio when I was a kid was mostly country and western,” she wrote in her memoir, “I, Tina,” and her superlative covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and the Beatles’ “Get Back” showed her mastery of the rootsier side of rock ’n’ roll.
On “Tina Turns the Country On!,” her 1974 solo debut, she amplified the deep yearning of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” added a righteous twang to a gender-flipped version of Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me,” toughened up Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” and found the gospel undertone in Dolly Parton’s “There’ll Always Be Music.”
The album earned a Grammy nomination for best R&B vocal performance, female, but didn’t chart, and Turner found greater success with her next LP, “Acid Queen,” which leaned back toward rock. Though she never made another country album, outtakes from the “Tina Turns the Country On!” sessions came out later, including fiery renditions of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s “Good Hearted Woman” (a song originally inspired by an ad Jennings had read for an Ike and Tina release), Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man).”
Linda Martell
Linda Martell had recorded a few early ’60s singles in a girl-group R&B vein when an aspiring music manager heard her singing country covers at a U.S. Air Force base in South Carolina. He convinced her to come to Nashville, where she quickly signed a record deal and tracked a debut LP, “Color Me Country” from 1970, that solidified her reboot as a country singer.
Three singles made Billboard’s country songs chart, with Martell’s beautifully understa…
