*A country music station in Oklahoma has responded to the outage to their initial decision not to play a new single from Beyoncé’s forthcoming country album.
Queen Bey released two new country songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” on Sunday. As the BeyHive celebrated the new tracks, one fan on social media, user @jussato, accused KYKC 100.1 FM of rejecting their request for them to play “Texas Hold ’Em.” This individual hit up X/Twiter to share a screenshot of the email exchange with the radio station, writing, “I requested ‘Texas Hold ’Em’ at my local country radio station (KYKC) and after requesting, I received an email from the radio station stating, “We do not play Beyoncé on KYKC as we are a country music station.”
“This station needs to be held accountable for their blatant racism and discrimination against Beyoncé,” @jussato added in a separate post.
The radio station’s response immediately drew accusations on social media of “blatant racism.“
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The X user tagged the popular fan account @BeyLegion, in the post. The fan account, which has more than 460k followers, posted: “#BeyHive! Let’s kindly educate Oklahoma country radio station 1001 KYKC that Beyoncé’s upcoming project and already released singles are indeed country music! Remember to be kind and diplomatic.”
100.1 KYKC in Ada, Oklahoma, tweeted amid the backlash that the station will play the song.
“We initially refused to play it in the same manner if someone requested us to play the Rolling Stones on our country station,” general manager Roger Harris said in the statement. “Fact is we play Beyonce’ on TWO of our other stations and love her…she is an icon. We just didn’t know about the song….then when we found out about it, we tried to get the song….which we did and we have already played it 3 times on YKC, our country station.”
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As a small station, Harris said securing the song was difficult.
“We are not a ‘big boy’ station and getting record companies to service us is tough,” he said. “But…finally we got our hands on it, and based on the fan support, we decided to air it…truthfully, normally we would (usually) wait a while to see how the song performs on the charts and on bigger country stations than ours, as we are just the little guys.”
Beyoncé’s new country album debuts March 29.
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