In 2023, Beyoncé became the most-awarded artist in Grammy Awards history with 32 wins. Her nods for that ceremony brought her total nomination count to 88, tied with her husband Jay-Z for the most of any artist in Grammy Awards history. Now, she’s shattered the record completely with an additional 11 nominations. She has 99 problems, but making Grammy history ain’t one.
In the general fields, Beyoncé is nominated for Song and Record of the Year for “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the history-making record that made her the first Black woman to hit Number One on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. She also scored her fifth career nomination for Album of the Year for Cowboy Carter — which gives the Recording Academy yet another chance to get it right after Jay-Z pointed out the glaring disconnect in the ratio of Beyoncé’s historic nominations to her AOTY wins during a speech at the ceremony earlier this year.
“Sweet Honey Buckin,” the penultimate song on Cowboy Carter, finds the musician making a slick nod to the Grammy Awards: “A-O-T-Y, I ain’t win /I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Each time she has been nominated for Album of the Year since receiving her first nod in 2010, she has done exactly that. And despite never walking away with the award — not for the landscape-changing Beyoncé, not for the culture-shifting Lemonade, not for the homage-paying Renaissance — Beyoncé has continued to set an inimitable artistic standard in music.
Beyoncé’s batch of nominations also includes five first-time nods across the Country and American Roots Music categories. Her country nods include Best Country Album for Cowboy Carter; Best Country Solo Performance for “16 Carriages”; Best Country Song for “Texas Hold ‘Em”; and Best Country Duo/Group Performance for “II Most Wanted” featuring Miley Cyrus. The fiery Cowboy Carter deep cut “YA YA” is nominated for Best Americana Performance.
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It’s a full circle moment after the Recording Academy’s country music committee deemed Beyoncé’s first outright country effort, the Lemonade deep cut “Daddy Lessons,” ineligible for Best Country Song in 2016 by rejecting its submission to the category. Cowboy Carter was also notably absent from this year’s CMA Awards nominations after a scornful experience at the ceremony in 2016 propelled her to dive deep into the country genre on her own terms. Beyoncé competes in these Grammy Awards categories against a few Cowboy Carter collaborators, including Shaboozey and Post Malone. She’s also in the company of country heavyweights Kacey Musgraves, Chris Stapleton, Lainey Wilson, and more.
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This is the first year that Beyoncé appears in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category. She earned a nod for “Levii’s Jeans,” which features Post Malone, another genre-hopping artist who made a full-fledged shift to country this year. These nominations also see the musician making a return to the pop and rap categories with nods in Best Pop Solo Performance for “Bodyguard” and Best Melodic Rap Performance for “Spaghettii,” which features a set of history-making country collaborators: the fast-rising star Shaboozey and the pioneer Linda Martell, who earns her first-ever Grammy Award nomination more than 50 years after she became the first Black woman to break through in the genre.
“This album has been over five years in the making. 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,” Beyoncé shared in a statement ahead of Cowboy Carter’s arrival in March. “It feels good to see how music can unite so many people around the world while also amplifying the voices of some of the people who have dedicated so much of their lives to educating on our musical history. The criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me. Act II is a result of challenging myself, and taking my time to bend and blend genres together to create this body of work.”
