NEW YORK – In Oklahoma, United States, a small country music station that refused a listener’s request to play a new song by American pop star Beyonce was forced to change its tune, after an uproar from fans who say that black artistes are too often excluded from the genre.

On the morning of Feb 13, Mr Justin McGowan requested that the DJs at KYKC, a country music radio station in Ada, play Texas Hold ’Em, one of two new songs Beyonce had released as announced in a Super Bowl commercial on Feb 11.

Beyonce – who grew up in Houston – sings about hoedowns in the twangy track, which features a fellow black Grammy winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on banjo and viola.

Station manager Roger Harris e-mailed Mr McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyonce at KYKC as we are a country music station.”

In sending the e-mail, Mr Harris unwittingly ignited a new flame in a long-simmering debate over how black artistes fit into country music, a genre that has black music at its roots.

In the Super Bowl advertisement, Beyonce joked that her new release would “break the Internet”. The 42-year-old was not kidding.

Mr McGowan put a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a Beyonce fan group in a post that drew 3.4 million views on X, formerly known as Twitter, and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok.

“This is absolutely ridiculous and racist,” he wrote, urging people to e-mail the station and request the song.

Fans bombarded KYKC with hundreds of e-mails and phone calls, criticising the station for not playing the song, according to Mr Harris, the station manager for 48 years.

“I’ve never experienced anything in my career like the amount of communications that we received in support of the song,” he said in an interview.

In between fielding calls and e-mails from angry Beyonce fans, Mr Harris said the station scrambled to procure a high-quality version of Texas Hold ’Em, which DJs played three times in Feb 13 night’s rotation.

Beyonce’s new songs appear on an upcoming album that she has referred to as Act II, part of a three-volume project that music critics have said is about reclaiming black roots of popular music.

Mr Harris said he was not aware of that project. He said the radio network, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation, regularly plays Beyonce on its Top 40 and adult hit stations.

“We haven’t played her on our country station because she’s not a country artiste,” he said. “Well, now I guess she wants to be, and we’re all for it.”

Mr Harris said the station’s rotation is guided by where a song appears on the charts, and by what bigger stations play.

This was not the first time Beyonce’s country music credentials have been called into question by arbiters of the genre.

When the star submitted her 2016 song Daddy Lessons from the album Lemonade for a Grammy in the country category, the Recording Academy’s country music committee rejected it, The Associated Press reported at the time.

Some fans responded with scorn to her live performance of Daddy Lessons with American country band The Chicks at the Country Music Awards in 2016, arguing that she did not belong at the ceremony.

The removal in 2019 by Billboard of hip-hop artiste Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road from the country chart generated a debate over what constitutes country music and how race affects the conversation.

The Black Opry – a social media hub for black artistes and black fans of country, blues, folk and Americana – used the radio station controversy involving Beyonce to direct her fans to its playlists on Spotify featuring other black artistes in country music.

Dr Charles Hughes, director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Centre at Rhodes College, said the Oklahoma radio station’s initial dismissal of Beyonce symbolised how “country radio has systematically excluded artistes of colour”, particularly women.

But if anyone can break down the barriers in country, Dr Hughes said, it is Beyonce and her fans, known as the BeyHive.

“Maybe that power will create an expanded space for all these great black women making country music,” he said, “to make it more in line with the people who love country music and the country it’s supposed to represent.” NYTIMES