YOU JUMPED GENRE LINES AND YOU EXPECTED OPEN ARMS?????

 So apparently Beyonce - aka Queen B - is saying that a couple years back during some awards show, she sang a song which sounded Country music like ...
And people were saying they were going to protest because apparently she's African-American <<althought, if you know me, I hate this term because not every cocoa skinned persons ancestors came from Africa, and even if they did, there are way too many countries in Africa to group them all together ... like Asian-American, it should be considered an ethnic slur, in and of itself>>

I think Queen B needs to go down to Nashville, and Bakersfield (did you know CA had their own country scene?) and actually MEET some of the black country arists ... and yes, there are some.   Not a lot .., but there are some.

Charlie Pride had an interview during a PBS mini-series "Country Music" where he spoke of the first time he appeared at the Grand Ole Opry ...
The announcer introduced him - the crowd went wild ...
then he walked out on the stage ... and the crowd quieted down - not in an anticipatory way of waiting for a really good singer, but in a shocked way.

You see -- music itself, has no real "race" or "color" to it ,,, and on the radio - he was the biggest thing since pre-sliced cheese!
Most country music fans just ASSUMED he was white ... 

He said it just took them a bit to get comfortable with the fact that he wasn't white ... but they still bought his records ... until he released a song about kissing a blonde woman in the morning ...

yeah ...

well in the 60s and early 70s, that was still a pretty huge deal.

In the bigger cities, it was even a big deal.

It was okay in the 70s for a black guy to date a white gal, but if a black gal dated a white guy - SHE was in trouble with others of her own race.

It was horrid.

I remember going to North Carolina one Spring with my foks to visit my AUnt Marge -- she took us to some big discount place to get some Easter candy , while there she spotted a white girl pushing a stroller with a black child in it.
She gasped - now she grew up in Minnesota, and had moved down there about 10 years before this time for her job - I asked what was wrong, and she told me

I told her I didn't see any issue with it, and she was totally shocked!!
Sometimes it isn't a skin color issue ... sometimes it isn't a where they were raised issue ... sometimes its a WHEN issue, in this case when she was BORN ...
My mom and her sisters were raised in South Minneapolis ... during the 1920s ... it was a very white neighborhood ... very white ... 
These days, the neighborhood is a minority of whites .... and its where the George Floyd riots went off the rails, where the rioters burnt down the police station ....

Times change ....
People change ...

But .... it takes TIME .... shoving things down people's throats doesn't make it any better - in fact, it could make it worse.

So, if Queen B wants to release a country music song or album - that's perfectly fine - it may not do as well as her other stuff .... but not because of her skin color .... not because of her race ...

It will more likely be because she has switched GENRE ... 

You see - it took a long bit before Rock-a-billy was accepted into Country Music circles too ...
The old time twangy music is now labelled "Bluegrass" ... it is pretty heavy on religion too.
But when Hank Williams Jr. started releasing his own style of music too ... and he comes from Country Royalty ... he didn't do so good either.

In fact, he was doing so bad that he almost gave up all together.

And if you are ONLY looking at RACE as a possible motive for why your song wasn't so well recieved, deary, then you likely will MISS all the OTHER people who DON'T fit into your narrow scope of vision who ALSO had issues being ACCEPTED.

I'm just saying .... these days ... I highly DOUBT it was your race/heritage