BEYONCE - "Texas Hold 'Em"

I’ve been faffing around on this one for ages - it was Number 1 for five weeks and now isn't and I still didn't write it. I finally realised I needed to just get the thing done before I listen to Cowboy Carter, which is going to move the discourse around this song, and this phase of Beyoncé’s career, forward another few steps anyway.

That discourse hasn’t been brilliant, it seems to me. It’s proceeded in a familiar, probably inevitable, way. Beyoncé releases a country, or country-adjacent, pop song. Some country gatekeepers, but also a wider range of right-wing culture warriors, seized on the opportunity to dismiss “Texas Hold ‘Em” as Not-Country with plenty of dog-whistle hints that Beyoncé has no real right to be singing this music. Which meant in turn that “Texas Hold ‘Em” got locked into a wider conversation about the Black roots of country music and the artistry of Black women making it (like Rhiannon Giddens, who plays on the record and wrote pointedly about the topic and the bogus controversy in the Guardian)

We live in times when that conversation has to be had, when those roots and artistry and legacy have to be declared. But it does push “Texas Hold ‘Em” into a conversation about authenticity and roots, and that isn’t the only conversation to be had about it. In fact it’s one in which this likeable, sly, sometimes goofy single can be asked to bear a weight it doesn’t need to.

From the three country tracks I’ve heard by her - this, “16 Carriages”, and “Daddy Lessons” from 2016’s Lemonade - Beyoncé’s approach isn’t so much “what if I made a country record?”, but “what would country need to be like if it had to accommodate how I perform?”. In other words, this isn’t a loving genre visitation like, say, Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning, or (slightly more respectably) an act of emotional recognition like Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue. This is a project that reaches back to those roots and imagines a world where the industry-driven separation of genre Giddens talks about in her Guardian piece never happened, where these songs’ melange of R&B vocals, pop precision production, country themes and instruments, rock crescendos and woozy New Orleans jazz are part of what the country genre is naturally. And by doing that, yes, she makes it so in our world too.

“Texas Hold ‘Em” is firmly at the pop end of the project - playful, fun, winking at critics (friends and foes) who try to ground it. The “woo!”s sound plugged-in, in conversation with “Cotton Eye Joe” as much as with Bob Wills, but “Cotton Eye Joe” is part of the country multiverse too. The lyrics aren’t a strong point, for me - a stew of local references (though how many other country songs are talking about climate change?). My favourite part of the song is at the end, a dissolve into post-hoedown glow, and a cheeky, blissful hint that, hey, maybe this was all just dress-up: “Furs, spurs, boots / Solargenic, photogenic, shoot”. Texas Hold ‘Em is a game of bluff, after all.