As you might know, Beyoncé’s upcoming country music album, Cowboy Carter, is set to be released later this month, on March 29.
Beyoncé, who surprised the world with the music announcement last month at the Super Bowl, recently revealed that the upcoming album was inspired by her not feeling “welcomed” into the country music scene.
Back in 2016, Beyoncé — who is from Houston — sadly faced unfair backlash when she released a country song named “Daddy Lessons.”
When Beyoncé performed the song at the Country Music Association Awards alongside the Chicks in November of that year, some country fans were upset. A month later, it was reported that the Grammy Awards’ Country Music Committee had rejected the song from its country music category.
While Beyoncé didn’t explicitly mention any of the unfair controversy around “Daddy Lessons,” fans have since speculated that her upcoming album is her continued way of “reclaiming” power.
And it seems as though she's doing exactly that.
Since releasing two songs from Cowboy Carter this year, Beyoncé has made history as the first Black woman to secure the top spot on the Hot Country Songs chart — something she acknowledged this week. And more recently, Beyoncé unveiled the artwork for Cowboy Carter’s limited vinyl edition.
On the cover, Beyoncé poses wearing nothing but a pageant sash across her body that reads “Beyincé,” with an “I.”
But it’s safe to say that the spelling is not an error, and instead a nod to Beyoncé’s mom’s maiden name — something that Tina Knowles-Lawson has spoken about at length in the past.
Back in 2020, Tina revealed that the name “Beyoncé” was actually her maiden name — which derived from the moniker “Beyincé,” after a hospital staff member misspelt it on a birth certificate.
“It's interesting because a lot of people don’t know that Beyoncé is my last name,” she shared on the In My Heart podcast. “It’s my maiden name. My name was Celestine Beyoncé, which at that time was not a cool thing, to have that weird name. I wanted my name to be Linda Smith, because those were the cool names.”
Tina went on, “I think me and my brother Skip were the only two that had B-E-Y-O-N-C-E. We asked my mother when I was grown. I was like, ‘Why is my brother’s name spelled B-E-Y-I-N-C-E? You know, it’s all these different spellings.’ And my mom’s reply to me was, like, ‘That’s what they put on your birth certificate.’”
“So I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you argue and make them correct it?’ And she said, ‘I did one time, the first time, and I was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate,’ because at one time Black people didn’t get birth certificates,” Tina added.
Tina went on to elaborate on the racist history of denying Black people birth certificates: “It meant that you really didn't exist. You weren't important. It was that subliminal message. And so I understood that that must have been horrible for her, not to even be able to have her children's names spelled correctly.”
“They were like, ‘How dare you have a French name.’ Like, ‘We’re gonna screw this up real good for you.’ And that's what they did. So we all have different spellings,” she added.
With this in mind, several people praised Beyoncé’s “iconic” move to print “Beyincé” across the cover of her latest vinyl artwork.
“She’s literally proclaiming and reclaiming her name that her grandma was denied at the hospital,” one person wrote. “The correct spelling of the family name was stolen and Tina went on to name her first born daughter Beyoncé- a name that will live forever. THIS ALBUM is a reclamation. She’s coming for ALL of her ancestral things,” another user said.
