For country music traditionalists, Grammy changes promise a brighter spotlight

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To get a sense of how wide the country music landscape — and the divides within it — are in 2025, consider the varied reactions to an announcement the Recording Academy made in June: The best country album trophy was being retired and replaced with a pair of more precise honors, for best contemporary and best traditional country album.

Some casual observers immediately thought of Beyoncé, the last artist (for now at least, last as in final) to claim that prize. Any news that involves her has the potential to mobilize an online army. And when Andrea Williams — who chronicles the experiences of Black talent in the country music industry — noticed some online commenters interpreting the Grammy change as a backlash to Cowboy Carter's best country album win in February, she offered a rebuttal with a pointed column for Nashville's Tennessean newspaper.

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"We got this narrative of people saying, 'Now the regular country category is not good enough anymore, because this Black woman won it,' " Williams said in an interview later. She disagreed with the notion that any sort of avenue had been cleared for other Black country artists to repeat Beyoncé's triumph: "It is, to me, so clear that this is just an opportunity to give white people more awards, because the white people themselves have had a hard time fitting into that single country category."

But Williams is hardly the only one who thought country music has ballooned to the point that a single Grammy award category couldn't accommodate the genre's stylistic extremes. That same point has long been made in independent and predominately white outlaw country circles positioned in opposition to the industry.

Texas-based Kyle Coroneos knows them well. On his long-established blog Saving Country Music, he's attentively, and sometimes argumentatively, critiqued the quality and authenticity of country output from Nashville, sure, but especially from the performers and scenes that operate well outside it. "For years, a lot of the traditional community felt disenfranchised from that process," says Coroneos, "and not just from the Grammys, but really from all of commercial country."

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Country music's explosion in mainstream popularity has only deepened those tensions. Blockbuster country releases have dominated the pop charts, holding their own against the biggest hits from other genres. And lately, the superstar country crossover efforts haven't been limited to Beyoncé. Both Post Malone and BigXthaPlug shaped head-turning albums around collaborations with Nashville hitmakers; Lana del Rey's got her own