Texas Hold 'Em

The history “Texas Hold ’Em” made is not in dispute: released in February 2024 as Cowboy Carter’s co-lead single, it debuted atop Hot Country Songs — making Beyoncé the first Black woman to reach No. 1 on that chart — and went on to top the Hot 100 outright, her ninth solo chart-topper and the first time a Black female artist has led that chart with a country record. Both firsts arrived decades later than they should have, in a genre with a well-documented history of pushing Black artists to its margins, and Beyoncé has been direct about that context shaping the album around it.

The song itself, heard apart from that context, is a front-porch singalong built around banjo from Rhiannon Giddens, hand claps, and a chorus engineered to be shouted by a stadium — well-crafted, catchy, and country in the plainest, least argumentative sense of the word. That’s also its limitation. Cowboy Carter takes real genre-collage risks elsewhere — a Beatles cover, a Dolly Parton interpolation, tracks that fold zydeco and opera and trap drums into the same four minutes — and “Texas Hold ’Em,” by comparison, is the album’s safest, most radio-legible entry point. Critics split accordingly: Variety called it “genre-embracing and -transcending” and The Guardian praised its “rootsy and authentically country” arrangement, while The Washington Post found it “dull, dry, unimaginative” and Pitchfork flagged the production as generic.

Both readings are defensible, and that’s not really a contradiction — a song can be historically overdue and, on its own musical terms, a competent mid-tempo single rather than a great one. The two facts don’t cancel each other out; they’re just answering different questions.

7.5/10 — an important record that opened doors Cowboy Carter’s other tracks walk through more interestingly than this one does.

Hero image: Beyoncé performing on the Cowboy Carter world tour, Paris, June 21, 2025, by Carsl, licensed under CC BY 4.0.