Willie Jones and Shaboozey on What It’s Like to Collab With Beyoncé on ‘Cowboy Carter’

The buzz surrounding the March 29 release of Beyoncé’s country-inspired Act II: Cowboy Carter project, the second in a trilogy of albums following 2022’s Renaissance, has led to streaming lifts and a wave of recognition for several of the rising Black country artists featured on the project, including Shaboozey, Willie Jones, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy. According to Luminate, Roberts’s catalog streams jumped 59%, followed by Adell (58%), Kennedy (56%), Spencer (41%), Jones (31%) and Shaboozey (16%).

The wide-ranging Cowboy Carter folds in music including country, Americana, an Italian aria, songs made popular by Chuck Berry, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, as well as moments of Brazilian funk, and welcomes a spectrum of artists including pop hitmakers Miley Cyrus and Post Malone, spoken cameos from Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson and an interpolation of Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” Meanwhile, the album also pays tribute to pioneers such as Black female country trailblazer Linda Martell, while shining a light on country music’s Black roots and the legacy of Black country artists who have paved (and are paving) their own paths.

While Adell, Kennedy, Roberts and Spencer offer up vocals mostly collectively on “Blackbiird,” and provide harmonies on other tracks, Shaboozey and Jones are each featured on separate tracks. Shaboozey, the Virginia-born artist known for his own genre-melding songs (including “Vegas,” “Beverly Hills” and his viral hit from 2023, “Let It Burn”), appears on two songs on Cowboy Carter: “Sweet Honey Buckiin’” and “Spaghettii.”

Shaboozey noted that like some other creators on the album, he spent time at a studio in Los Angeles. “It’s all collaborative,” he says of contributing his portion of songs to the project earlier this year. “Everyone’s working at the same time and different rooms and I came in a couple of days and recorded some parts. [Beyoncé] heard them later and liked them. It’s cool how you don’t know until the last moment if your part made it or not. We were waiting up until 9 p.m. PT [on album release day] to know if we made the cut.”

Martell, who was the first Black female country artist to perform on the Grand Ole Opry, does a spoken-word intro to “Spaghettii.” According to Luminate, she has since seen her catalog streams rise from a little under 5,000 streams during the weekend of March 22-24 to 61,000 streams from March 29-31, making a 1,100% surge. Shaboozey says when he began contributing to “Spaghettii,” he did not know about Martell’s segment.

“That’s how Beyoncé, she likes to put things together, taking different parts of different things and different bridges, always experimenting with the sound, so very free-form over there,” he says, adding “I’m also a huge Linda Martell supporter and I admire her story. It’s cool how everything came together and I’m really honored to be on a song with these two incredible individuals.”

Shaboozey is also gearing up for the release of his own country album next month, with Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, out May 31 via Empire. The project follows his previous projects, 2022’s Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die and his 2018 debut Lady Wrangler.

He describes his upcoming album as “a little bit of this genre that even Cowboy Carter created, just a bit of everything. A lot of country, but some hip-hop moments on there, too. But a lot of my personal story and journey into those records as well.”

Louisiana native Jones offers up vocals on “Just for Fun,” which was written by Beyonce, Dave Hamelin, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman and Ryan Beatty. Jones competed on The X Factor’s second season, where he auditioned with a version of Josh Turner’s “Your Man.” He issued his first album Down for It in 2021 and was part of the 2022 documentary For Love and Country, which focused on the careers, journeys and struggles of Black artists in country music. This week, he released his rendition of Usher’s “OMG” as part of a new Apple Music Sessions EP.

He notes that his favorite line in “Just For Fun” is “Time heals everything/ I don’t need anything, Hallelujah.” “I got in the studio and I heard the song and I related to it more than d–n near any song I’ve ever heard in my life. To be on the same track as Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is definitely a check off my bucket list.”

“She’s bringing people back to themselves and doing a lot of introspective work,” Jones says. “She’s talking about growth, family and legacy and when life gives you lemons make Lemonade. Then after that, she gave us Homecoming and it’s like she’s saying, ‘Go back to your roots and get educated.’ Then she gives us Renaissance, like, ‘Let’s dance, let’s be free.’ So it comes to this album, too, with songs like ‘American Requiem,’ ‘Blackbiird,’ ‘Spaghettii.’ It’s cool to see everybody’s streams go up, just because Beyoncé believed in her legacy and her roots and her ancestors. She trusted the universe enough to walk by faith and not by sight and be humble and open. She’s transforming country music for the lost and found so we can find our way back.”

Jones also notes the impact he says Beyoncé has had so many genres of music. “I say Beyoncé is my favorite rapper. She jumped on [Megan Thee Stallion’s] ‘Savage,’ and you saw the rap girls get a moment. Then with ‘Black Is King,’ and dropped the album with Disney and you saw Afrobeats go. So she did the same thing with country. I hope she does that with R&B, I hope she brings that back, because I need a ‘Dream Girls Part 2.’”

Shaboozey sums, “It feels awesome. It feels great for someone like her to enter the space that me and a few others have just been building on and creating from for a long time. It’s just amazing. We’re so happy to have such a powerhouse of an artist that chose to take this journey to country, so it’s amazing to be a part of that.”