The Yeehaw Agenda shows no signs of slowing down.
Fresh off his appearance on Beyoncé’s landmark country album Cowboy Carter, the legendary Willie Nelson has teamed up with the masked queer musician Orville Peck. On Thursday, the pair released the official video for “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” the lead single off Peck’s forthcoming new album, Stampede, which is set to be an album of duets, according to the singer’s Instagram.
In the ballad, a cover of Ned Sublette’s original, Peck and Nelson sing about the presence of queerness everywhere, especially in places such as small towns in the American West. “Well, there's many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas/ There's many a young boy who feels things he can't comprehend,” Peck croons in the song’s opening lines. “And a small town don’t like it when somebody falls between sexes / No, a small town don’t like it when a cowboy has feelings for men.”
Nelson then joins in with a verse that basically ends gender essentialism. “But I believe to my soul that inside every man is the feminine / And inside every lady there’s a big manly voice loud and clear,” Nelson sings. “Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he’s done with his women / But thе ones who brag loudest are thе ones that are most likely queer.”
The song has a long history: Sublette first wrote and released it in 1981. Nelson then covered the song in 2006, before joining Peck on his 2024 cover. Peck said that Nelson felt it was important to release the song again now, given the political headwinds the LGBTQ+ community currently faces.
“Willie kept talking about how the subject matter in this song was more important than ever,” Peck told Rolling Stone. “He wanted it to have a new life with the two of us. With all the rhetoric surrounding the LGBTQIA+ community these days, it is so encouraging to have real allies like Willie that aren’t afraid to stand proudly next to us.”
Peck also revealed that covering the song was Nelson’s idea. “As an artist who has sometimes felt excluded from the country music industry, once Willie Nelson wants to work with you, there’s really nothing the country world can say after that,” he said.
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Though Nelson, who is now 90 years old, is a country music legend, he’s also still making music — and lending his gravitas to projects that continue to widen the country music umbrella. Last month, Nelson appeared on several tracks on Beyoncé’s Western-influenced album Cowboy Carter. Nelson acts as a sort of narrator for the album, announcing songs on a fictional radio station named KNTRY.
Prior to the release of Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé shared the impetus for making the album in an Instagram caption. “This album has been over five years in the making. It 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 music superstar wrote. “But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.” Though Beyoncé did not name the experience, many people have speculated that Queen Bey is referring to her 2016 performance of her song “Daddy Lessons” at the Country Music Awards.
Beyoncé’s album has revived an interest in the real and long history of Black cowboys, especially in her home state of Texas. “I think that there are these narratives about what America is, and that's always been coded as white,” Francesca Royster, a professor of English at DePaul University, recently told the BBC. “The cowboy has been this heroic image to justify Western expansion, and it just seems necessary to make that figure white, even though there were always Black cowboys.” (Historians estimate that one in four cowboys in the 1800s and early 1900s were Black, according to Smithsonian magazine.)
Just as Beyoncé’s album has highlighted the long-forgotten Black history of cowboys, so too does Peck’s highlight the reality that cowboys have always been queer AF. Films such as 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, 2021’s The Power of the Dog, and 2023’s Almodóvar short A Strange Way of Life similarly attest to this truth. As Chris Packard writes in his 2005 book Queer Cowboys, “The cowboy is queer: he is odd; he doesn’t fit in; he resists community; he eschews lasting ties with women but embraces rock-solid bonds with same-sex partners.”
Peck and Nelson’s new single, much like Beyoncé’s new album, not only reflects a widening of the country music audience but also a necessary revision of a history that’s been, in more ways than one, whitewashed.
Though Peck just released this single, and has given us the title of his new album, he has not yet indicated a release date for the forthcoming LP.
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