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The megastar first released the 27-track project March 29, 2024. As Beyoncé’s first country album, she made sure to feature country legends such as Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and country music pioneer Linda Martell. She also collaborated with crossover artists such as Miley Cyrus and Post Malone, as well as emerging Black country artists such as Shaboozey, Willie Jones, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy.

The album became a catalyst for the renewed spotlight on Black country artists and the genre’s Black roots. “Cowboy Carter” has challenged music industry norms and sparked important conversations pertaining to the intersection of race and country music.

On the one-year anniversary of “Cowboy Carter,” here’s a look back at 19 significant moments from its trailblazing year.

‘Blackbird’ contributors speak about Beyonce and country music

‘Blackbiird’ contributors speak about Beyoncé’s impact on country music

1. Beyoncé shocked fans by announcing the album and releasing singles “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” in a surprise Super Bowl commercial in February 2024.
2. Beyoncé became first Black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart after her single “Texas Hold ‘Em” debuted at No. 1.
3. Simultaneously, the song held the No. 1 spot on seven of Billboard’s charts: Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, Hot Gospel Songs, Hot Latin Songs, Hot R&B Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.
4. Within a week of its release, “Texas Hold ‘Em” debuted at No. 54 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.
5. Beyoncé also became the first woman to top both Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs since the lists’ inception.
6. Beyoncé made history again as the first Black woman to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s top country albums chart.
7. “Cowboy Carter” also reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Americana/folk albums and top album sales charts.
8. “Cowboy Carter” was snubbed at the 2024 Country Music Association Awards, receiving zero nominations. However, the album earned 12 nominations at the 2024 People’s Choice Country Awards, making Beyoncé the leading nominee.
9. Beyoncé then took home her first country music award for top country female artist at the 2024 Billboard Music Awards.
10. Beyoncé put on an NFL halftime performance during the Texans-Ravens game on Christmas Day, dubbed “A Cowboy Carter Christmas.” The live performance drew 27 million U.S. viewers, according to Netflix.
11. Beyoncé became the leading nominee at the 2025 Grammy Awards after the album scored 11 nominations.
12. The “Cowboy Carter” nominations also allowed Beyoncé to become the most nominated artist in the show’s history with a total of 99 career nods.
13. Her nominations included five awards in the country and American roots field — her first in that category.
14. Country music pioneer Linda Martell earned her first Grammy nomination for her feature on “Spaghettii.”
15. Beyoncé won the award for best country duo/group performance for “II Most Wanted” with Miley Cyrus, making history as the first Black female solo artist to win a Grammy for a country song. The Pointer Sisters won in a similar category in 1975.
16. Beyoncé took home best country album at the Grammy Awards. It was the first time a Black woman was nominated and won in the category.
17. The “Cowboy Carter” creator also took home the top prize of the evening, album of the year. She joined only three other Black women in the show’s history to earn the honor.
18. Beyoncé announced her highly anticipated Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour for the award-winning album.
19. She quickly made history with the tour. She stands to set the record for most shows by any artist on a single run at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. She’ll also become the act with the most performances at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

The Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour will kick off April 28 in Los Angeles. Since the initial announcement, Beyoncé has added a handful of shows including final shows in Las Vegas.

Follow Caché McClay, the USA TODAY Network’s Beyoncé Knowles-Carter reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @cachemcclay.

The Poison frontman, who tours regularly with his solo band for what he calls Parti Gras shows, always takes a few minutes to share his support for active troops and veterans before performing Poison’s poignant 1990 ballad, “Something to Believe In.”

Michaels’ dad, Wally, was a veteran of the Navy, and others in his family have military backgrounds. Michaels also works regularly with Operation Homefront, which provides aid to military families.

“We found we love the freedoms and opportunities afforded to us by the sacrifices of many,” Michaels tells USA TODAY.

In “The Life List,” (streaming now on Netflix), Carson plays Alex Rose, a young woman who loses her mother to cancer and then attempts to find herself by revisiting the goals she created as a child.

There are some parts of the role that don’t run parallel to Carson’s life; for example, her mother Laura is not only alive but present for the interview. The film’s “life list” includes getting a tattoo and shooting hoops against a New York Knicks player. Carson doesn’t have tattoos and needed a coach to assist with the basketball scene opposite Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing.

But as Carson, 31, thinks about what she’d take from Alex’s bucket list to write on her own, she immediately gravitates toward one item.

Hilary Swank’s mystery “Yellowjackets” character has finally been revealed: The two-time Oscar winner is playing the adult version of Melissa, confirming another character from the teen timeline is still alive in the present.

The latest episode of the Showtime series (Sunday, 8 ET/PT, but now streaming on Paramount+) explained that Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) ex-girlfriend faked her death, changed her name to Kelly and has been living a quiet life married to the daughter of Hannah (Ashley Sutton), one of the frog researchers whose death the Yellowjackets have been covering up. Before she died, Hannah gave Melissa a tape with a message for her daughter, Alex. But Melissa never delivered it, instead keeping a close eye on Alex to make sure she was OK before unexpectedly falling in love with her.

Melissa’s relationship with Alex is part of what “has helped heal” her, Swank says, but despite the couple’s twisted origin, she “doesn’t think that it’s weird.

“It’s such a psychologically interesting thing that you are trying to make peace with the past,” she says. “You know that this person loved their daughter, and your way of making peace with it is to love that person the way you think that person would love them. It’s so intense.”

“Season 5 is our most intense yet,” says Dallas Jenkins, creator of the first multi-season historical drama about Jesus. “There’s a million people all in one city, the enemies, the followers, the friends, the believers, the antagonists. They’re all together, and they’re all plotting either for or against Jesus.”

The eight-episode “The Chosen: Last Supper” resumes where the previous one left off, capturing a crowd celebrating the arrival in Jerusalem of Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) at the start of the week (known as Palm Sunday) and ending before Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Like Season 4, the season will be divided into three waves for its theatrical release: Part 1 arrives in theaters March 28, Part 2 on April 4 and Part 3 on April 11. The entire season will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in June.

The day before filming of the Last Supper began last July, production designer James Cunningham walked through the studio, about 25 miles sourthwest of Dallas, as the blaring Texas sun, sent temperatures into the 90s.

The set was redesigned three times to fit the small space, Cunningham said. Bright yellow caution tape blocked off parts of the Garden of Gethsemane, still under construction. It was “a gigantic undertaking” that included olive trees shipped in from California and a cave.

“This is the season where some of the most iconic moments in history are taking place,” Jenkins says. “You’ve got the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. You’ve got the turning over the tables in the temple. You got the Last Supper. You got Judas’ betrayal. These are moments that have such visual and emotional weight that I think that, more than any season we’ve ever done, it demands to be seen on the big screen.”

‘The Chosen: Last Supper’: Watch the Season 5 trailer now

“The Chosen” creator Dallas Jenkins says Season 5 of the faith-based series focused on Holy Week will be the series’ “most intense and heaviest” yet.

Yet even the small moments are impactful, Jenkins says, like when Jesus is by himself shouldering the agony to come.

“What he’s thinking about happening in the future, what he’s thinking about happening in the past and what he knows is going to happen this week, it’s got such dramatic weight to it that it feels big, even though it’s just one person,” Jenkins says.

Jenkins and Roumie highlight what’s to come.

Jonathan Roumie shows off ‘extraordinary’ whip skills

Part 1 of the season shows Jesus enraged at the sight of the market in the temple, “completely boiling over with righteous indignation,” Roumie says. He’s angered that the poor are being extorted with outrageous taxes, a “breaking point” for Jesus. “To take a stand for those people and to make a point, he cleanses the temple of those influences that he feels have defiled the temple and also sets in motion a series of events that will be irreversible,” Roumie says, “leading him ultimately to the cross, which was the plan from the very beginning.”

Jesus flips tables and cracks a whip he made himself. For the scene, Roumie trained with whip master Anthony De Longis, who’s also worked with Harrison Ford on “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and Michelle Pfeiffer for her turn as Catwoman in “Batman Returns.”

That practice paid off, Jenkins says. “There’s a really awesome moment when Jonathan swings the whip and the end of the whip wraps around a leg of a table, and he did it in one take,” Jenkins says. The shot, he says, is “extraordinary.”

The Last Supper illustrates ‘the key theme of the season’

For five days, Jenkins and his crew filmed their version of the Last Supper on a sound stage in Midlothian, Texas, more than 7,000 miles from Jerusalem. The meal, shared by Jesus and his disciples in “The Chosen,” emphasizes one of the season’s important motifs, Jenkins says.

“Jesus is telling his closest friends, ‘I’m not going to be with you much longer. But here’s what’s to come,’” he says. “And they’re like, ‘This must be a metaphor. You can’t be serious that the Messiah, the savior of the world, is going to cause more division and is going to actually leave us. That doesn’t make any sense.’ The key theme of the season is can you still trust and follow even when you don’t understand?”

Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet during the meal is one of the moments that touched Roumie.

“Here you have the master of this group of disciples acting as the servant to his students, and it was just profound and unheard of and shocking,” he says. “We have moments like that that we recreated, that for me and for many of the other cast members were just deeply, deeply moving. And I’m so excited for people to see what we have in store.”

When ‘The Chosen’ Jesus met giant serpent Satan: Jonathan Roumie dishes on 16-foot python co-star

Judas’ ‘very horrible and regretful’ betrayal

Knowing that Judas led the authorities to Jesus, Jenkins and his team worked backward in constructing Judas’ journey.

“I think it’s safe to say that he was a follower; he was a believer,” Jenkins says. “Something corrupted him over time, and what might that have been? That was really exciting to explore with our actor Luke Dimyan, and I think we did a job that’s effective. I think it’s plausible.”

Dimyan feels Judas’ actions stem from a place of despair.

“He’s very disappointed in what he’s seeing and hoping from the Messiah because he’s filled with so much fear and anxiety and dread for his people,” Dimyan says. “And he wants them to be saved, (and perhaps) more so, himself to be saved. And now we see the culmination of all those fears and anxieties just turn into a very horrible and regretful decision that he’s going to later feel a lot of guilt for.”

In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which opened March 27 at the Music Box Theatre, Sarah Snook pulls off nothing short of a Herculean feat. The Emmy winner, who brought steely ambition to Shiv Roy on HBO’s “Succession,” is tasked not only with slipping in and out of multiple roles on a dime, plucking from a mélange of wigs, costumes, voices and mannerisms. But she is also continuously asked to act against herself, performing entire scenes with as many as five or six different prerecorded selves, which are strikingly projected onto massive screens.

If your head is already spinning, then buckle up. In director Kip Williams’ audacious, gender-bent adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, a small army of camera operators essentially shoot a movie in real time. The effect is both staggeringly impressive and exhaustingly relentless.

As in Wilde’s book, the play follows a beautiful but vain young man named Dorian Gray, who commissions a portrait from the infatuated artist Basil Hallward. Fearing he will one day lose his comely features, Dorian makes the rash decision to sell his soul to the devil, so that his portrait may fade and age while he remains boyish. But as it goes with any Faustian bargain, Dorian’s vicious descent into egomania comes with a fatal price.