After slogging through poverty, indifference and Hannah Montana impersonations, the US singer is an award-winning sensation and selling out a UK tour. She explains why her genre is going mainstream like never before

You get the sense the country music establishment really had no choice but to embrace Lainey Wilson: that she wasn’t going anywhere until they did. When the singer-songwriter arrived in Nashville in 2011, she parked her 20-foot bumper pull trailer on a studio’s lawn and anchored it with rocks. Then 19, she had lived country music all her life. But Nashville is what they call a “10-year town”, rarely a place of instant hits and TikTok fame. Wilson had to do it the old-fashioned way: a decade of graft, rejection, false starts, handing out CDs in the streets, gigs, tours and playing to the same crowds over and over.

Gradually, things started to click (a publishing deal in 2017), then gather momentum (six No 1s on country radio since 2021), then snowball (a record-breaking nine nominations at the 2023 CMA awards, winning five), culminating in February when her 2022 album, Bell Bottom Country , won this year’s Grammy for country album of the year . Wilson is now one of the hottest properties in country music. An overnight sensation 11 years in the making, as she puts it. “It feels great,” says Wilson, 31, over video call, with her irresistible Louisiana twang, “because it makes me feel like maybe I wasn’t as crazy as a lot of people thought I was. Like, I told ya!”

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The American multi-instrumentalist combines a wide range of Black musical traditions on her beautifully crafted fifth solo album

Multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla was exploring the Black legacies of country music and Americana long before Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter made the idea mainstream. As a member of the group Our Native Daughters, she has highlighted the presence of Black female banjo players, while her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops explored the Black songbook for strings.

In her solo output, McCalla expands her purview to take in music from the African diaspora. On this, her fifth album, she provides 10 gorgeously crafted songs that veer from Afrobeat to Brazilian tropicalismo, as well as folk and country. Glittering, highlife-inspired guitars are a buoyant touch on celebratory tracks such as Open the Road and Take Me Away, while the plaintive plucking of Tree and the sweeping cello of I Want to Believe showcase McCalla’s storytelling songwriting, presenting hopeful tales of self-exploration.

The superstar arrives in Europe next month – and Swifties, tourist boards and venues are already preparing

Tim Brown, 44, and his wife, Marcella, 34, may not consider themselves bona fide “Swifties”, but when it was announced last June that Taylor Swift would be visiting their corner of the globe this summer they could not resist joining the scramble for a pair of tickets.

A post-pandemic appetite for live music events has fuelled huge worldwide interest in the American singer-songwriter’s Eras tour, which surpassed in $1bn sales in November to become the highest-grossing series of concerts in history.

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The Texan superstar’s eighth album is a thrilling 27-track journey through and beyond America’s roots music, and it feels like a genuine feast

Ever since Beyoncé – to quote the lady herself – “changed the game with that digital drop” via her self-titled fifth album , released without warning in 2013, she’s become the fixed point around which popular culture oscillates. Bandwidth-swallowing think pieces, detailed decoding of every lyric, plus an increasingly vexed right-wing America have kept her name on everyone’s lips. She wasn’t exactly a cult concern before, but the last decade has seen her move beyond mere superstar status, aided by 2016’s internet sleuth-facilitating infidelity opus Lemonade and 2022’s liberated, post-lockdown dance party, Renaissance .

That last album was billed teasingly as Act I, and now arrives the second part of a mooted trilogy. While Renaissance , with its celebration of the oft-ignored influence of Black queer dance pioneers, facilitated a healthy amount of debate, you could cobble together a hefty book on the discourse that’s already swirling around Cowboy Carter . Inspired by a less than welcome reaction to the Texan’s performance of her country single Daddy Lessons at the 2016 Country Music Awards – where she was dismissed as a “pop artist”, seemingly code for “Black woman” – it’s an album that takes country music by its plaid shirt collar, holds up its (mainly) male, pale and stale status to the light and sets it on fire.

For all her declarations of being authentically country, Cowboy Carter arrives on the back of booming business for the genre and is all about the star, not the roots music supposedly at the project’s heart

On the first track of Beyoncé ’s new album, she seems to state the impetus behind the project: “They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough.” That rejection was an unnamed experience in which she has said she “did not feel welcomed”, assumed to be her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music awards. It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment, as well as outrage at Beyoncé giving a platform to the Chicks, who had been in exile from the industry since singer Natalie Maines criticised George W Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in 2002.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s 27-track response. On the album’s cover, she is on a horse, holding an American flag, draped in US flag apparel, with her long blond tresses flowing and a cowboy hat atop her head. In the few details she has shared about the album, she said she “did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive”. As she became the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1 and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song and debate over her place in the genre reigned, no greater a country luminary than Dolly Parton lent her support. Later it was revealed that she and outlaw legend Willie Nelson were to feature on the album, cementing its country bona fides.

Beyoncé’s new album Cowboy Carter takes her into a genre that is ‘typically a white thing’

Where Beyoncé leads, we must follow – even if that’s nights on the western range, rattlesnakes, whisky and all manner of heartbreak and loss. The Houston-raised pop superstar has expanded her formidable range with the release on Friday of Cowboy Carter .

Where her last album, Renaissance , took us to Chicago for 90s house music, the latest release moves in on Nashville, incorporating blues, soul, rock, R&B and folk, and has reignited a debate over how the country genre treats artists of colour.

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Straying far beyond its original country concept, the musician’s eighth album straddles the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the blues – and Becky with the Good Hair via Dolly Parton’s Jolene

American Requiem, the opening track of Beyoncé’s eighth studio album, is many things. It offers a touch of state-of-the-nation address – “Can we stand for something? Now is the time to face the wind” – and a sprinkling of the kind of vague but apparently personal lyrics that send social media into a frenzy of decoding: what are her “father’s sins” that Beyoncé has apparently “cleansed” herself of? Who are the “fairweather friends” for whom she claims to be planning “a funeral”?

It’s also a loud statement of what you might call Beyoncé’s bona fides. She is, she avers, “the grandbaby of a moonshine man [from] Gadsden, Alabama” who furthermore has roots in Louisiana. “They used to say I spoke too country,” she protests, adding: “What could be more country than that?”

Keir Starmer is on a personal mission to promote music to the under-11s. From rock’n’roll to Jonathan Richman, our writers suggest songs for an alternative schooling

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Rock’n’roll is nearly 70 years old: it can just sound arcane and distant to ears trained on 21st-century pop. An effective crash course in its revolutionary importance, how it changed Britain forever requires not one track, but two. First, play something that constituted pop music before Little Richard et al arrived: Dickie Valentine’s The Finger of Suspicion, Anne Shelton’s Lay Down Your Arms or Guy Mitchell’s frankly horrifying paean to fatherhood, Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po). Then play Long Tall Sally, the feral opening seconds of which – in the context of what came before – sound like a bomb going off, or the world being turned on its head. Alexis Petridis

The singer announced her next record on Instagram with a photo of herself riding a horse and wearing red, white and blue

The countdown to Beyoncé’s next album, Act II, is officially on, marked by the superstar herself on Instagram. In a post that doubled as the album art drop, Beyoncé revealed an image of herself riding a white horse, holding an American flag, decked out in red, white and blue.

“This album has been over five years in the making,” wrote Beyoncé in the accompanying caption. “It was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t.” In 2016, the singer faced backlash from the mainstream country community after releasing a country song.