The 2024 CMA Awards will go on tonight without Beyoncé in attendance.
There was much speculation about whether or not the “Texas Hold ‘Em” singer would be included in this year’s CMA nominations. And when the lists of nominees came out with Beyoncé nowhere to be found, some felt as though she was snubbed, while others felt as though her album Cowboy Carter wasn’t enough to garner nomination.
To be clear, the CMA Award nominations are determined through a three-round ballot process. The first round ballot consists of write-in submissions, the second-round is highest vote getters from those write-ins, and then the third round ballot establishes the top five in each category.
According to the Washington Post, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter made made it through to the second-round ballot for Album of the Year, and she reached that stage as well for Female Vocalist of the Year, but neither ultimately made the top five.
Though Beyoncé isn’t nominated at the CMA’s, she did receive 11 Grammy nominations, and undoubtedly produced one of the most talked about “country” projects of the year. She made it very clear when she announced her album via social media that Cowboy Carter was an album that took years to bring together, and that it was inspired by a specific moment in her music career:
“This album has been over five years in the making. It was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed… and it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.”
Though Beyoncé never came out and explicitly said it, it’s hard to imagine that the R&B singer is alluding to anything other than her 2016 CMA Awards “Daddy Lessons” performance with the Chicks. The performance – and her presence at the show – resulted in backlash, and country music legend Alan Jackson even got up and walked out during the performance.
Later on in her Instagram caption, she finished with an exclamation point, saying that her Cowboy Carter project was not a country record:
“This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album. This is COWBOY CARTER, and I am proud to share it with y’all!”
Notice that Beyoncé came out and said that Cowboy Carter wasn’t a “country album.”
That’s consistently been a talking point when discussions revolved around whether or not Beyoncé is a part of the country music community. That was actually a question that was recently pointed at CMA voters as the Washington Post searched to answer the question of why Beyoncé wasn’t nominated at the CMA Awards.
In case you didn’t know, there are 6,609 eligible voting members that determine the nominations – working in careers like radio, publicity, and media. Of those thousands of voting members, 10 CMA voters were reached out to, and though some expressed sympathy for Beyoncé not getting nominations (some even said they voted for her), many were very blunt and transparent with why the pop star didn’t get any nods from the CMA Awards.
One voter raved about the record, but concluded that there wasn’t enough country substance to consider it in the country music category:
“There was so much that was cool about that record. And so much that is not country about that record.”
Another was rather harsh (though understandable), citing that Beyonce never tried to engrain herself in the country music scene, and that nominating her for briefly dipping into country music would be a disservice to all of the artists out there that are country music artists through and through:
“Beyoncé hasn’t performed at the Opry, she hasn’t been a public presence in Nashville. I do think that there is a belief that country artists have spent years of their lives working on their country craft, so (voters) don’t want to take away their chance at a nomination for somebody who’s just doing one album that’s country and then moving on to another genre.”
And finally, one voter cut to the chase and kept the reasoning simple. Remember how Beyoncé said Cowboy Carter “ain’t a country album?” This voter certainly did:
“If you state it’s not a country album, okay, it shouldn’t be nominated for any country awards.”
Hard to argue that one.
