Beyonce goes Country with help from Dolly Parton… and I love it! ADRIAN THRILLS reviews the pop icon’s Cowboy Carter album as she goes back to her rodeo roots

Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter

Verdict: Back to his rodeo roots

Classification:

Having established herself as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Beyoncé Knowles is now adding another string (a vibrant, Nashville-made one) to her mighty bow.

Cowboy Carter is her first full-length foray into country music, and to make the point, the album cover shows her as a Stetson-wearing rodeo queen, sitting (in a saddle) atop a big white horse.

“It has people in Galveston, with roots in Louisiana,” he drawls about American Requiem (the unusual spelling is his).

“They used to say I talked too much country.”

It’s an opening gambit that sets the tone for an epic 80-minute gallop through American musical history that at times feels more like a series of tracks from a Western-oriented blockbuster than a pop album, but it’s all modes raises the bar very high.

Texas-born Beyonce, 42, made a name for herself with the stylish R&B trio Destiny’s Child, but her earliest musical memories involved a visit to the Houston Rodeo, where she was exposed to country, folk and rhythm music and fifties blues.

She sang there four times and was inspired as much by Southern fashion and culture as she was by the music.

Cowboy Carter certainly boasts a kaleidoscopic variety of sounds.

Instead of the electronic dance beats that fueled the 2022 Renaissance, we have soft acoustic strums, pedal steel guitars, accordion, harmonica, washboard, fiddle, and banjo.

There’s clapping, boot stomping on hardwood floors… and Beyoncé’s long nails as a percussion instrument.

This is not a completely national record. The genre-bending singer is keen to point out that it’s simply ‘a Beyonce album,’ and among the yee-haws and violins, there are steps toward country rock and reminders of her background in R&B and dance.

Her Southern credentials are enhanced by appearances by Nashville greats Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, but she stamps her own identity strongly throughout.

At the center is that powerful and versatile voice. She shines in acoustic dance Texas Hold ‘Em and, at the other extreme, delivers a harmony-drenched version of Paul McCartney’s Blackbird from the Beatles’ White Album, which was inspired in part by racial segregation in the United States. 60s.

Dolly Parton’s spoken interlude (“Hello, Miss Honey B, I’m Dolly P”) precedes a cover of the country icon’s classic Jolene.

The clear model here is Whitney Houston’s powerful 1992 cover of Ms Parton’s I Will Always Love You, and Beyonce does not disappoint, adding lyrical and musical twists.

Cowboy Carter loses some sharpness as he enters the home stretch.

Ya Ya begins with a sample of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ and veers into The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, while dance track II Hands II Heaven could be a Renaissance outtake.

But you can’t fault his ambition. “The joy of creating music is that there are no rules,” says Beyoncé.

If there were any doubts about her latest exercise in confounding expectations, she dispels them in the best possible way: by co-writing some magnificent songs and delivering them with dazzling aplomb.