Beyoncé Is the First Black Woman to Top Billboard’s Country Albums Chart

There’s no reining her in.

Beyoncé debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with Cowboy Carter, her genre-blending country opus, giving the superstar the eighth chart-topper of her career, Billboard announced on Sunday.

The album’s impressive but hardly unexpected performance also makes Bey the first Black woman to ever debut in the top place on the Top Country Albums chart since its launch in 1964.

Released on March 29, Cowboy Carter has shifted 407,000 units in the U.S. alone, by far the splashiest debut of 2024 and the biggest since last November, when Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) moved 1.652 million units. That’s not the only time Beyoncé and Swift were mentioned in the same breath on Sunday; Billboard also noted that Cowboy Carter is the best-selling country album since Swift’s Speak Now landed in July 2023.

The 407,000 units break down to 232,000 attributable to streaming (or just over 300 million official streams), 168,000 to traditional album sales, and 7,000 to track equivalent album sales. All in all, it marks Beyoncé’s best sales week since 2016’s Lemonade, which clocked in at 653,000 units.

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The numbers come in more than a month after the release of Cowboy Carter’s lead single, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which gave a similarly commanding performance by topping the Hot Country Songs chart for more than six weeks. This made Beyoncé the first Black woman to have a chart-topping country single.

The album’s record-smashing debut sees Beyoncé cruise ahead of Janet Jackson for fourth-most No. 1s among female artists. In third remains Madonna, with Barbra Streisand and Swift holding the silver and gold medals, respectively.

Featuring old-school country legends like Dolly Parton, Linda Martell, and Willie Nelson, Cowboy Carter has been received rapturously by critics and fans alike. Also known as Act II: Cowboy Carter, the album is the second installment of a planned three-part album series that kicked off with 2022’s dance album Renaissance.

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