But its achievement can’t be corralled into a single musical genre. It’s an album-length paean to a panoply of traditions, from folk to roots to country to rock to hip-hop, that together make American music great. It’s an album full of gospel and guns, car rides and cowboys, whiskey, weed and wine; of Jesus, money, furious fights between lovers, and the gentleness and wisdom of wily elders. The 27 tracks on “Cowboy Carter” are packed with musical quotes, jokes and dead serious historical reckonings, featuring a diversity of cultures all bringing their stories, religions, melodies, spirits, ancestors and rituals together for one big dance.
The musical references that Beyoncé employs are wide-ranging and eclectic. Different listeners will hear different echoes, based on their own personal tastes. To my ear, “Ameriican Requiem,” the album’s first track, first evokes the gospel standard “Down To The River To Pray.” But I also hear echoes of The Who’s “Tommy,” Lead Belly’s “Looky Looky Yonder” and, wait, is that a nod I hear to Buffalo Springfield’s 60’s protest anthem, “For What It’s Worth”? With a dash of Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” all in one song?
To truly understand the project of “Cowboy Carter,” it helps to start with the guitar. This instrument was carried to the American West by various paths, including by Mexican vaqueros. The guitar became a mainstay in cowboy music — you can’t fit a piano on a horse.
As the folklorist Alan Lomax writes in “Folk Songs of North America,” the “Texas cowboys adopted the Mexican vaquero’s costume, acquired his savvy of cattle and horses, and stole his herds.” The music of European-descended cowboys was influenced by vaqueros, and Black cowboys put their own twist on these American guitar stylings.
Many freedmen, post-slavery, learned the cattle trade and became rodeo riders. Huddie Ledbetter — better known as Lead Belly — stands as one of America’s greatest cowboy singers, and Lead Belly’s catalog now all but defines classic rock; “No Lead Belly, no Beatles,” as George Harrison once memorably declared. Faithful renditions of Lead Belly’s arrangements have been covered by artists as disparate as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin and Nirvana, to name a few. His stylings have roots in country guitar, but he transported the sound to something that roamed far away from the cowboy ranch — all the way to the tracks on “Cowboy Carter.”