Shaboozey's side-eye at the AMAs was him reckoning with his place in country music

Yahoo

27-05-2025

Megan Moroney was sincere when she said that the Carter Family "basically invented country music" during the American Music Awards broadcast on Monday, May 26.
First, she was likely reading from a script, the exact lines she was meant to recite scrolling on a teleprompter in front of her. And second, she is a country artist from Georgia, a country girl with country roots, and one of the brightest new faces of country music.
It makes sense, then, that she regurgitated one of the industry's favorite talking points: That country music was born of Jimmie Rogers and those famous Carters. That everyone else is merely a derivative, expected to pay incessant homage to the originals who recorded in those Bristol sessions nearly 100 years ago.
But there was Shaboozey, standing alongside Moroney, side-eyeing and smirking and no doubt thinking about the Black man who made the Carter Family's success possible.
Back in February 2024, right after Beyoncé dropped 'Texas Hold 'Em' and '16 Carriages,' the first two tracks from her 'Cowboy Carter' album, I wrote about the significance of her collaborations with Black creatives—what I saw as an echo of sorts to A.P. Carter's reliance on Riddle:
It was Riddle who guided A.P. Carter on a tour of Black Appalachia, gathering songs from the folk singers and bluesmen dotting the area, musicians who married their unique guitar stylings with distinctly Black melodies and cadences. While A.P. wrote down the lyrics, Riddle memorized everything else, using his own guitar to make beautiful music. When A.P. and Riddle reconnected with Sara and Maybelle, Riddle often tweaked the songs they'd gathered to perfectly suit the Carters' recordings.
I also noted that, while there is periodic emphasis on Black artists breaking through industry barriers, less can be said for Black songwriters, musicians, and producers. The creatives aren't just skipped over by white artists—Black artists pass them over too.
Call it an attempt to assimilate or flat-out ignorance, but celebrating a handful of Black artists who attempt to build country music careers while refusing to acknowledge other Black creatives isn't just bad for the industry. It's also bad for the community of Black songwriters, musicians, and producers whose dreams can only be realized through artist collaboration.
Which is what makes Shaboozey's AMAs reaction so important.
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With his raised eyebrows and slight chuckle, Shaboozey didn't just cast doubt on country music's century-old fiction. He also acknowledged the Black creatives who will never stand at the front of a stage or sing into a mic—but who are important, and influential, all the same.
It just took Shaboozey a little while to get there.
In May 2024, fellow Black country (and 'Cowboy Carter'-featured) artist Willie Jones called out the all-White cast of the video for Shaboozey's record-setting smash 'A Bar Song (Tipsy).'
Jones said Shaboozey was 'a fly in a milk bowl' in his own video, and despite the cavalcade of voices that determined Jones was simply a 'hater' and jealous of Shaboozey's success, I agreed with the optics' downsides.
And I noted how Shaboozey's casting decisions were a reflection of the way things have always been done in country music, particularly for Black artists who hope to follow in Charley Pride's assimilationist footsteps:
An industry that allows for only sporadic, individual Black successes is one that never truly evolves. It, instead, waits for the next Black artist willing to play the game and follow suit, the artist who will proclaim that their Blackness is a safe kind of Blackness, that it is, in fact, the only Blackness needed.
That same month, an interview with Essence Magazine seemed to reinforce Shaboozey's willingness to adhere to Nashville's racial rules—or, at best, his ignorance of their existence and impact.
'When I got into the space there wasn't too much representation,' he said. 'You've obviously got Darius Rucker, Jimmy Allen, and Mickey Guyton, and Charlie [sic] Pride, all these people. But that's not a lot if you compare that pot of how many hip-hop artists there are, R&B artists. You go to country music, it's about four or five. And then as far as new ones go, it's again not that many.'
A Lesley Riddle nod would've been great there—not to negate the reality that there weren't many Black country artists visible in the mainstream, but, rather, to explain why that is. It would've been great for him to speak to the creatives whose careers were stunted, not for lack of will or effort but because of the industry's refusal to support them.
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Maybe then he would've opened his arms wide to Black collaborators, lifting them as he climbed the charts, the same way Beyoncé did for him.
But it's entirely possible that Shaboozey just didn't know—that he, like Moroney, had sipped too long on the country music Kool-Aid, accepting long-told lies as truths. After all, in that same interview, he said that he 'didn't realize how tough it was going to be to get acceptance' in the genre.
I'm sure Shaboozey's massive success with 'A Bar Song' initially skewed his perspective, that with his rapid ascent and crossover appeal, he likely assumed he'd cracked the code on the industry's artificial Whiteness.
I've talked to enough Black folks around country music (as well as White women, who face their own gendered barriers in the format) to know that the same egocentrism that draws artists to music industry careers also inhibits their ability to see deep-seated issues as structural, rather than circumstantial.
But it is said that experience is the best teacher, and I'm willing to bet that's the case here, too.
Maybe, for Shaboozey, it was being shut out of awards from both the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music, despite the unprecedented success of 'A Bar Song.' Maybe it was the realization that landing at number one, and staying there for months, wouldn't guarantee radio support for subsequent records.
Or maybe it was the understanding that, despite his impact on country music, Shaboozey may very well end up like Lesley Riddle—largely unacknowledged, without even a Country Music Hall of Fame induction by which to remember him.
Either way, we're here now. And for all the ignorance Shaboozey displayed at the outset of his country music career, he finally saw fit to set the record straight on the true origins of country music, on who's been here before and deserves to be here now.
And to that I say: Better late than never.
Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at [e-mail] or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite and BlueSky at @andreawillwrite.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Shaboozey AMAs side-eye shows Black erasure in country music | Opinion