Back in August the 29-year-old country singer Shaboozey gave the packed audience at the Grammy Museum some advice for staying healthy on the road.
Whenever he plays his smash hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) he swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The two have "got a history," he touts in the song’s chorus.
But after one especially raucous show, Shaboozey recalled a manager taking him aside backstage. "They said, ‘You know you can put iced tea in there instead’," the singer said and laughed.
Later that night, when he performed the song twice in a row, he indeed pulled a bottle of Jack for the big moment. Who knows what was actually in there, but if it was whiskey, Shaboozey definitely deserved a real shot.
The singer-songwriter, a Virginia-raised child of Nigerian-American parents, has become the breakout country artist of the year, appearing on Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter and dominating charts with A Bar Song (Tipsy). His LP Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going belongs on any list of the year’s most important country records.
Shaboozey’s been embraced by country’s establishment, but as a young Black man in America’s most conservative music format, he’s under no illusions about it. His songwriting is bracing and melancholy in ways A Bar Song (Tipsy) barely suggests. After his raucous ascent on the back of a huge hit, will country fans stay for the real thing?
"I’ve been going to Stagecoach for years, walking through there when nobody knows who you are, and you’re one of very few people of colour at that whole festival," he said. "Who would have known, like, two years later that same dude is playing to 60,000 people screaming."
Born Collins Chibueze, his artist name is a riff on a nickname, given by a high school football coach who failed at spelling his name right.
In person, he’s tall and commanding, still with the muscular frame of a young athlete, but also the soft-spoken baritone of someone who’s worked out a lot of complicated feelings in his songwriting.
That day, A Bar Song (Tipsy) was still in the saddle atop the airplay charts, making Shaboozey arguably the buzziest singer in the most influential genre in America right now.
The single is diabolically perfect in its craft — it discreetly calls back to J-Kwon’s 2004 hit Tipsy, an elder-millennial party staple. The chorus is boisterously chantable on a big night out, but its lyrics are flintier than you think ("Gasoline and groceries, the list goes on and on/ This 9 to 5 ain’t workin’, why the hell do I work so hard?").
Country and rap, historically pitted against each other, have always been cousins, whose sounds have intertwined closely over recent years. Shaboozey understood both as a common reference point for younger country fans, using that sweaty party anthem for a sly twist on the drinking-song tradition.
"It’s just a staple of country music, the drinking song," Shaboozey said. "But I knew the world was looking for something unique. Y2K is coming back, everyone’s playing 2000’s music already, and Tipsy was a big party song. So you fill it up a little bit, this equation, just in time for summer. I feel like we ticked all the boxes, but we put a lot of work in to be ready for a moment like that."
That moment paid off across formats, topping country airplay charts when like-minded songs by Lil Nas X (Old Town Road) and Beyonce (Texas Hold ’Em) never came close.
However, it was a call to work on Beyonce’s concept album, drawing on the Black roots of country music and the outlaw place that Black people carved out in a country, that changed his life.
Shaboozey brought a regal, trap-infused croon to the banger Spaghettii, and a nimble R&B run to Sweet Honey Buckiin’, each highlights of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, an album that bore witness to a Black culture intertwined with American cowboy archetypes.
"It felt like I was where I was meant to be," he said. "You’re not brought there to be nervous. You’re there to do what you do best."
Shaboozey admired Beyonce for taking the risk to make a country-inspired album with no guarantee of being embraced by Nashville (its reaction to her barnstorming 2016 CMA performance with the Chicks was mixed, to say the least).
"We’re aligned on seeing the mirrors between hip-hop and country, and being Black and being an outlaw," Shaboozey said. "Having to protect yourself, being forced to band together to survive."
Shaboozey’s own upbringing was typically American in some ways — a childhood in the slow town of Woodbridge, Virginia, fascinated by the country music his Nigerian dad grew to love.
He found deeper connections between the West African culture of his parents and the Americana they adopted.
"I think there’s the folk tales, the storytelling aspect that you see in Western African music that’s also a very big part of country music," he said. "Obviously the banjo’s got African roots too. Country music came from people in the South and Appalachia, slaves and indentured servants from Europe, each gathering and trading stories."
Shaboozey’s album is rich with connections between all corners of Black and Southern Americana. Will the Nashville establishment welcome the full picture?
"Especially after Beyonce, his sound is pushing the country format in a direction that’s very timely right now," said Amanda Marie Martinez, a historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who studies the intersection of race and country music.
Black acts like the War and Treaty and Mickey Guyton have won critical acclaim, but "country radio still dictates business practices and its gatekeepers wield power," she says. "If you look back from Charley Pride to Darius Rucker to Kane Brown, Nashville usually only allows one Black man to succeed at a time, and that’s troubling. There’s never been a Black woman with sustained commercial success on country radio. It’s not a nice reality, but the only template is to not talk about anything controversial with regards to being a Black man in country."
For his part, Shaboozey said the Nashville establishment has been open to his vision.
"When I went over there, I think it’s just a lot of people just trying to write good music," he said. — TCA
