Despite captivating the country world with her album Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé did not receive a single nomination for the 2024 Country Music Awards on Monday morning.
Normally, Beyoncé’s wide-ranging output doesn’t always apply to the CMAs’ narrow aim. But given the detailed emphasis on country music’s past, present, and future on Cowboy Carter, this year would have been the most appropriate. The album sat atop Billboard’s Country Music Chart for four weeks, and the album’s lead single “Texas Hold ‘Em” held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs list for 10 weeks — making Beyoncé the first Black woman to achieve such a feat.
Still, when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter last spring, she told fans that it “ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” In the same post, she also mentioned that the album 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.” The comment likely referred to Beyoncé’s 2016 performance at the CMAs alongside The Chicks, where they performed Bey’s Lemonade song “Daddy Lessons.”
While the CMA voters weren’t so sweet on Beyoncé’s country-fied opus, they were definitely into Morgan Wallen this year. The former Voice contestant-turned-country-superstar racked up seven nominations, including Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, and Song and Single of the Year nominations for his Post Malone collaboration, “I Had Some Help.”
Meanwhile, Kacey Musgraves is back on the nominee sheet for her excellent new record Deeper Well, which we named as one of the best albums of 2024 so far. Beyoncé collaborator Shaboozey also scored a pair of nominations for New Artist of the Year and Single of the Year (for his smash hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”). Other artists who scored major nominations include Chris Stapleton, Cody Johnson, Lainey Wilson, Luke Combs, and Jelly Roll, whose nominated album Whitsett Chapel arrived before the close of last year’s eligibility period (The CMAs claim it’s because “the majority of its consumption occurred in the [current] eligibility period.”)
Several high-profile country albums from this year — like Zach Bryan’s The Great American Bar Scene and Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion — were released outside of the 2024 eligibility period, and therefore will be in contention for next year’s CMAs. Check out the full list of nominations here.
The 2024 Country Music Awards go down on November 20th, and will be airing live on ABC from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena.