In Oklahoma, a small country music station that initially refused a listener’s request to play a new Beyoncé song has been forced to change its tune after an uproar from fans who say black artists are too often excluded from the genre.
On Tuesday morning, Justin McGowan asked the DJs at KYKC, a country music radio station in Ada, to play “Texas Hold’Em,” one of two new songs released by Beyoncé as announced in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday.
Beyoncé, who grew up in Houston, sings about hoedowns, and the twangy song also features fellow black Grammy winner Rhiannon Giddens on banjo and viola.
Station manager Roger Harris emailed Mr. McGowan with a terse rejection: “We don’t play Beyoncé on KYKC as we are a country music station.” By sending the email, Mr. Harris unwittingly lit a new flame in a long-running debate about how Black artists fit into a genre that has Black music at its roots.
In the Super Bowl ad, Beyoncé joked that her new release would “break the internet.” He wasn’t kidding.
Mr McGowan posted a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a group of Beyoncé fans in a post that garnered 3.4 million views on X and sparked discussions on Reddit and TikTok.
“This is absolutely ridiculous and racist,” Mr McGowan wrote, urging people to email the station and request the song.
Fans bombarded KYKC with hundreds of emails and phone calls, criticizing the station for not playing the song, according to Mr. Harris, the station’s manager for 48 years.
“I’ve never experienced anything in my career like the number of communications we’ve received in support of the song,” he said in an interview.
Amid calls and emails from Beyoncé’s angry fans, Mr. Harris said the station tried to get a high-quality version of “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which DJs played three times on Tuesday night’s shift.
Beyoncé’s new songs appear on an upcoming album she has referred to as “Act II,” part of a three-volume project that music critics have said is about reclaiming black roots in popular music.
Mr Harris said he was not aware of this project. He said the radio network, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation, regularly plays Beyoncé on Top 40 and adult hit stations.
“We haven’t played her on our country station because she’s not a country artist,” he said. “Well, now I guess he wants to be, and we’re all for it.”
Mr. Harris said their rotation is driven by where a song appears on the charts and which major stations are playing it.
It wasn’t the first time Beyoncé’s country music credentials have been called into question by arbiters of the genre.
When the star submitted her 2016 song “Daddy Lessons” from the album “Lemonade” for a Grammy in the country category, the Recording Academy’s country music committee rejected it. The Associated Press reported at the time. (Beyoncé brought rodeo chic to her Renaissance world tour and to this year’s Grammys, wearing a white cowgirl hat and leather Louis Vuitton suit.) Some fans responded to the Chicks’ live performance of “Daddy Lessons” at the Country Music Awards with disdain. , claiming he didn’t belong at the ceremony.
Billboard’s 2019 removal of hip-hop artist Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the country chart sparked a debate about what constitutes country music and how race affects the conversation.
The Black Opry — a social networking hub for black artists and black fans of country, blues, folk and Americana — used the radio station’s controversy involving Beyoncé to direct her online fans to its Spotify playlists with other black artists in country music.
Charles Hughes, director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College, said Beyoncé’s initial firing from the Oklahoma radio station symbolized how “country radio has systematically excluded artists of color,” especially women.
But if anyone can break down barriers in the country, Dr. Hughes said, it’s Beyoncé and her fans, known as the BeyHive.
“Maybe that power will create an expanded space for all these great black women making country music,” she said, “to make it more aligned with the people who love country music and the country it’s supposed to represent.”