When you grow up in Texas, you know your country music.
There are the George Strait classics like “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” which is part of any high school dance, two-step event, or wedding in the Lone Star State. Try going to H-E-B without hearing Asleep at the Wheel’s “Miles and Miles of Texas” or seeing an F-150 without singing the words to “God Blessed Texas” under your breath.
As the song goes, “If you wanna see heaven, brother, here’s your chance. I’ve been sent to spread the message: God blessed Texas.”
And since Beyoncé won the Super Bowl in 2024, it’s gotten increasingly harder to avoid that delicious earworm in the first few lines of “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which has autoplayed on every Instagram reel in my feed for months.
That last song caused some folks to give their unsolicited — and maybe unnecessary! — opinions on what counts as country and what doesn’t. Though, thankfully, journalist Taylor Crumpton weighed in earlier this year in Time, writing a lede for the ages: “The greatest lie country music ever told was convincing the world that it is white.”
“That hillbilly music turned white at the turn of the 20th century,” Crumpton wrote. “Black musicians who created this music, alongside low-income white people, were suddenly classified under ‘race music.’ The lie became a truth.”
To her point, this time last year, some terribly problematic and racist country music owned the charts after (primarily white) conservatives tried to return us all to “the way things should be.” Morgan Wallen enjoyed a marathon chart-topping streak for his latest album — even after a 2021 video of the star casually dropping the n-word leaked — and his run was only interrupted by Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.” For those who were lucky enough to miss it, Aldean’s viral success was filled with references to lynching outsiders and accompanied by a music video shot at the site of a historic lynching.
Well, that’s enough of that.
It’s brat summer now, and the message permeating culture-at-large in the run-up to November’s presidential election is a resonating chorus of “we’re not going back.” In fact, last week’s Democratic National Convention featured country music artists like Texas’s Mickey Guyton and Alabama’s Jason Isbell, who stand leagues apart from the Aldeans and Wallens of the music world — and say they’re aiming to show listeners that country music is for everyone. And it doesn’t have to be racist, or push a conservative agenda, to be popular.
But while Texas has a veritable treasure trove of talented Black and brown country musicians — you may not hear about them unless you go looking.
In the past two decades, only 2% of country artists whose songs played on the radio were Black, Indigenous, or artists of color, according to research by Dr. Jada Watson, an assistant professor at University of Ottawa. And most of the radio airplay for that 2% was a rotation of three specific men: Jimmie Allen, Kane Brown, and Darius Rucker. Women of color have made up just 0.4% of country music radioplay.
“If you’re not a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied male, you’re not on air and you’re not on the radio — and so you don’t exist within that space,” Watson told The 19th. “There are multiple barriers to access to (the country music industry) and the biggest one is radio.”
Watson’s research contends: “Not only does this system not provide a clear path for BIPOC artists in Country music, but its internal practices — daytime programming and lack of retention for recurrent airplay — also erase contributions as they are being made.”
As Stephanie Bergara — the current lead singer of Austin’s popular Selena tribute band Bidi Bidi Banda and soon-to-be solo country artist — told us: “Beyoncé cracked open a door that the rest of us are running to kick down.” To that end, The Barbed Wire spoke to some of the artists of color who are trying to make it in the country music business. Take a seat.
Texas-born and Nashville-based Denitia is releasing her latest 12-song album, Sunset Drive, on September 6. The project features acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and her own angelic voice.
“When I was a kid growing up in Texas, I was obsessed and steeped in country music,” Denitia told The Barbed Wire. “That’s what my parents and I were listening to, and we’d go to the rodeo every year with our whole family.”
“My grandparents liked classic country, and my grandmother was listening to those ‘50s and ‘60s country hits when she was getting ready for work,” she continued. “Country music formed a foundation for me for what I thought was a great song, and I always carried that.”
According to her label, in 2023, Denitia earned one of five spots in a residency hosted by the Black Opry and WXPN, was named to Rissi Palmer’s Color Me Country class, and was one of three artists selected for CMT and mtheory’s Equal Access cohort. This year, Denitia is one of CMT’s 2024 Next Women of Country and was named an artist to watch by the Nashville Scene in January. She made her Grand Ole Opry debut in late June, and is set to open shows for Mickey Guyton in the fall.
As Denitia points out, country music has always belonged to people of color: “You’ve got folks like Rissi Palmer, who is still telling those stories and educating us about all of the black folks who have been in country music since the beginning, and who have continued to make country music and love it, and who do it now.”
“People ask me, you know, ‘Is it hard to be in country music as a Black woman?’ and automatically my first thought is that country music is about the people,” she said. “It’s not about the industry. It’s not about people in offices. It’s about people who are resonating with the sound and with the stories, and who love the music.”
Vinny Tovar, 27, started his music career four years ago and has since been signedis represented by Azteca Ranch Music, a new San Antonio-based country label. But he grew up surrounded by it.
“My dad’s band was called Los Tovares and now they’re a full country band,” said Tovar. “I grew up behind the stage, because I was always behind with my dad, loading in and helping, and growing up, I would do lights and stuff for them. So I felt like I was always in it.”
He saw firsthand the joy and hardship of combining Tejano and country, as his father and uncle performed to audiences who were fine with one or the other — but not both.
Tovar prides himself on playing some Spanish songs during his country sets. In fact, he calls his style of music “cuhntry,” a reclaiming of the term “cuh” — it’s short for cousin and at one point was used as a derogatory term to describe young Latino men with a bowl-style haircut traced back to Indigenous roots. But that infusion of Spanish language and Mexican culture hasn’t always been accepted. In June, a viral TikTok video showed Tovar being forced to end a set early after performing a song in Spanish. He told The Barbed Wire that he was told he was playing his music too loudly.
After the viral video, local San Antonio radio stations banded together to help support Tovar, holding a free concert titled #TurnUp4 Vinny. It was the exact kind of community support he needed, Tovar told The Barbed Wire.
“Be loud, be proud, sing whatever you want.”
“You can go back to Charley Pride,” Austin-raised country artist Zay Wilson said. “We’ve always been here.” The 28-year-old had an unusual journey, even for a musician: He broke into the country music scene earlier this year after a Netflix reality-TV stint, which included a rollercoaster season two of “The Ultimatum.” There are young people coming up in country who are “really, really good,” said Wilson, pointing to Breland, Willie Jones, Reyna Roberts, and Tanner Adell. It’s important to embrace emerging artists and to “give them a shot,” he said. “Welcome them in.”
Wilson had a tough childhood, and experienced homelessness, in North Austin near Rundberg Lane, an area that at one point accounted for 11% percent of the city’s violent crime. “I grew up not having love and both of my parents was on drugs,” he told The Barbed Wire. “It was just me and my two sisters really just taking care of each other.”
For Wilson, country music has been healing.
“Not having food and not having, you know, all these things… In country music, it talks about love, and it talks about the little things in life that you probably don’t even think of, but that you enjoy in the moment,” Wilson said, smiling brightly on a Zoom call last week. “And I fell in love with that. I just fell in love with country music. So, if I was to sing, I wouldn’t sing anything else.”
He simply can’t deny his roots and memories with the tunes.
Stephanie Bergara is the current lead singer of Bidi Bidi Banda — Austin’s popular Selena tribute band — and told The Barbed Wire she’s now in the production phase of launching a solo country music career.
“I went to college in San Antonio and Tejano music and country music kind of go hand in hand,” Bergara told The Barbed Wire. Thirty-eight–year-old Bergara initially thought she’d go pop next, since she was put off by some of the more problematic elements of country music. But the songwriting process kept leading her back to a level of emotion and soul that only felt right for country.
“The easiest thing has been to reflect those feelings and write those feelings against a country tune against a country instrumental,” she said. “It’s just the way that it’s coming out for me.”
“I really do feel like there are just, frankly, some racist undertones to country music in the Deep South,” Bergara said. “In the landscape that we live in, using words like Dixieland, Red Dirt, Southern rock, there’s — whether the intention or not, racist undertones for phrases like that.”
But with Beyoncé’s very purposeful rebranding as a country artist — and Grupo Frontera’s reclamation of cowboy culture — Bergara feels there are more opportunities to shine as an artist of color.
“The one thing that no one can ever take away from a Texas girl is that she is a Texas girl,” Bergara told The Barbed Wire. “I’m so impressed and inspired by Beyoncé’s willingness to be like, ‘Hey, I did this.’”
Ricky Duran, a 34-year-old Boston native and son of Guatemalan immigrants, said he wonders if he really fits into the country music scene. Duran was runner-up on Season 17 of NBC’s “The Voice;” he was asked to audition after a producer’s friend heard him play at a bar on Sixth Street in Austin.
“It’s actually still bizarre to me that I play some country music because I never grew up listening to it,” Duran said. “My last record got labeled as Americana, which is kind of like basically a blend of roots music from blues, soul, country. I do have a couple songs that I’m debating releasing. I just kind of hard on myself about releases, but they’re super country.”
“I don’t know if I want to go in that direction,” Duran said. “It’s primarily like, white culture music.”
“It makes me a little nervous, you know, and also it makes me feel a little less authentic,” he continued. “I’m a Guatemalan, Bostonian, now Austinite, that’s putting out a country record.”
Despite his reluctance to join the genre completely, Duran said he can’t stop writing country songs — and credits Chris Stapleton for his vulnerability in songwriting.
“My songwriting, lyrically for my first record, was pretty, kind of heavy, a little deep,” Duran told The Barbed Wire. “My most popular song off the record was an Americana country song about the loss of my mother.”
It’s that vulnerability in country music that keeps many Texans so rooted to it. At least, that’s the case for 22-year-old Wimberley native Bo Moore.
“Music is universal, and I think that’s one of the best parts about music, is anyone can listen to it, even if you speak a different language too, people can understand music, you can understand what it’s communicating, how it makes you feel,” Moore told The Barbed Wire.
Moore is the first musician in his family, though he listened to country music while hunting and fishing with his father. He got his first guitar for Christmas when he was 15, but he didn’t start singing until three years ago.
“I mean, we live in Wimberley and live a pretty country lifestyle out here, but I was big into rap in middle school. I was a big, big rap guy,” Moore remembered. But as he aged, he “fell in love” with country music recorded in the ‘80s and ‘90s. “The whole vibe,” he added, highlighting his love for George Strait’s music and storytelling.
“Texas is the best, best country in the world, if you ask me,” Moore said.
