One year after the release of Beyoncé’s Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter, “Texas Hold ‘Em” banjo player Rhiannon Giddens is opening up about feeling conflicted over her contributions to the culture-shifting project.
In an interview with Rolling Stone published Sunday ahead of the release of her own album What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Giddens shared that she has struggled with the pros and cons of appearing on such a high-profile album. On the one hand, plucking strings on the LP’s No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit single “Texas Hold ‘Em” allowed her to feel embraced by the mainstream Black community for the first time, she says — but on the other, it also made her feel like her contributions were simply part of a “transaction.”
“There are so many of us struggling to maintain our humanity in this industry,” Giddens told the publication. “My biggest talent is collaboration. I’m really into sharing and being one of many, and I feel like that’s important, but you can’t be a superstar and do that. You just can’t!”
“There are two examples I could pull out, in my entire 20-year career, where I feel like I had to make a compromise in order for a greater good,” she continued. “This was one of those times … And there were definitely benefits: I’ve heard from people saying more people are taking banjo classes and dancing to it because of [‘Texas Hold ‘Em’]. It also gave me an entrée into the Black community that I’ve never had, to be honest. Because of all the things I’ve been fighting for my whole life, it’s been difficult to be seen as a Black musician, especially since I’m mixed, all this sh–. But for the first time, I felt acceptance from the mainstream Black community, which made me weep.”
That said, Giddens said it was “really hard” to feel as though her talents were “treated as any other transaction in the music industry.” “Because I certainly didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that,” she elaborated. “I did it for the mission. So, my idea of what the mission is and somebody else’s idea of what the mission is are not going to be the same thing. There’s a reason why I’m not a multi-millionaire. If you are a multi-millionaire, there are reasons why. No shade, whatever. It means you do things in a certain way.”
The folk musician went on to give an example of a mainstream artist whose mission she does resonate with: Kendrick Lamar, whom Giddens says uses his platform “in an intensely activist way.” “I don’t know how he does it, but he did it,” she said. “He’s unique. Most people aren’t like him. So I can’t expect everybody to be like him, and that’s fine.”
Released in March 2024, Cowboy Carter was one of the year’s most talked-about albums. Featuring collaborations with Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus and Post Malone, the project sparked much discourse about the bounds of genre and whether Bey was “country enough” to make the pivot. The album was notably shut out by the Country Music Awards, receiving no nominations despite its success on the country charts (including the superstar becoming the first Black woman to ever top the Hot Country Songs chart). Cowboy Carter did, however, receive both best country album and album of the year at the 2025 Grammys.
At one point, Giddens herself even responded to the backlash Cowboy Carter faced from country music purists — whose dismissal of the album she said was “just racism” in an IMPACT x Nightline interview. “Nobody’s asking Lana Del Rey, ‘What right do you have to make a country record?’” Giddens said in March last year. “People don’t wanna say it’s because she’s Black. You know? But they use these … these coded terms, you know? And that’s problematic.”
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