From Seattle to the South: Witnessing Cowboy Carter

By Yanet Giles

Anyone who has been scrolling through social media and keeping up with the latest in pop culture has surely heard about or seen clips from the Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin Circuit Tour, the tenth world tour from Beyoncé in support of her latest album, Cowboy Carter. The album has, as Queen Bey intended, functioned as a reinvention of Americana, with particular homage to the contributions of the Black people who have not only pioneered country music, but pioneered the American culture as a whole. She spotlights all the significant Black figures and musicians that came before her -- from the unknown Black girl who helped sew the very first American flag, to Jimi Hendrix, to all the Black women that inspired her. For those who saw and loved Sinners this past spring and have now gone to the Cowboy Carter tour this summer will have noticed the reappearance of tap dancing, a dance form created by Black southerners that blends southern American and Irish dance tradition. After all, as she says so herself, this is a Beyoncé tour, not a country tour, and those in attendance will bear witness to the way she seamlessly blends genre, throwing it back to her previous Renaissance tour, a celebration of the house and electronic music genre, and the LGBTQ+ community that defined it. I had the pleasure of flying out to Atlanta, Georgia to meet up with a friend to attend the first show in her four night stay in the city, and I have to say, as a born and raised Seattlelite who has never previously been to the south, there is something very special about being in the part of the country that inspired this entire production in the first place. Beyoncé, as a southern Black woman who is now arguably the most famous musician in the world, has not for a second forgotten where she came from, and uses her stage to not only highlight that heritage, but uses that stage as an act of political demonstration. On my way home from the tour, I was so blown away by the storytelling aspect of her performance as told through the visuals on screen, the set pieces, the costumes, and the arrangement of the set list. I came across a blog post by Jose Richard Aviles, who attended the Cowboy Carter Tour in Los Angeles, and his reflections on the way in which the show begs us to consider our own place as Americans in this current political climate, as well as the way show allowed him to reflect on his own Mexican heritage as it closely resembles southern American culture, deeply resonated with me. I encourage you all to take a moment to read his piece which situates Cowboy Carter’s impact on a larger scale than current pop culture, but on contemporary culture as a whole.