Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour is a 36-song setlist spanning nearly three hours, divided into 10 acts that merge her country-inspired album with reworked classics. The performance opens with “Ameriican Requiem,” which frames the evening as a celebration of Black contributions to country music.
The inclusion of “Blackbird” and a fragmented rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” underscores her mission to amplify marginalised voices within the genre’s canon. Tracks like “Ya Ya” and “Spaghetti” demonstrate Beyoncé’s genre synthesis, mixing country instrumentation with funk rhythms and trap beats.
The Cowboy Carter album features artists like Post Malone and Shaboozey, figures bridging hip-hop and country. Her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” recontextualises the classic through a lens of matriarchal defiance. Paired with “Daddy Lessons,” a track from Lemonade, the segment becomes a meditation on empowerment and generational storytelling.
The Cowboy Carter album’s Grammy wins, including Best Country Album and Album of the Year, mark a pivotal moment for Black artists in a genre historically resistant to diversification. Beyoncé’s live renditions of tracks like “16 Carriages,” which juxtaposes her Houston upbringing with pedal steel melancholy, amplify this cultural reset.
Video interludes dissect country music’s contested history, including a segment titled “What Is Country?” that challenges rigid genre definitions, while staging elements merge Nashville iconography with Afrofuturist motifs.