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Beyoncé has announced her Cowboy Carter tour. But is she coming to Philly?

Nine cities are named on the 'Cowboy Carter Chitlin' Circuit Tour.' Philadelphia is not one of them. Yet.

Beyoncé accepts the Grammy Award for album of the year for "Cowboy Carter"  on Sunday in Los Angeles, with daughter Blue Ivy Carter. Beyoncé has announced her Cowboy Carter Chitlin' Circuit Tour, but the released list of cities does not include Philadelphia.
Beyoncé accepts the Grammy Award for album of the year for "Cowboy Carter" on Sunday in Los Angeles, with daughter Blue Ivy Carter. Beyoncé has announced her Cowboy Carter Chitlin' Circuit Tour, but the released list of cities does not include Philadelphia.Read moreChris Pizzello / Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Beyoncé finally won album of the year Grammy on Sunday, taking home the elusive award for last year’s Cowboy Carter after being nominated in the category four previous times.

With that prize — and three other trophies, including one for best country album — Beyoncé became just the fourth Black woman to win the top Grammys trophy, after Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston, and Lauryn Hill; and the first this century.

But that isn’t all the Beyoncé news that brewed over the weekend. On Saturday night, the global superstar announced that there would be a “Cowboy Carter Tour” with a social media post that contained only those three words.

Then late Sunday night, post-Grammys, she followed it up with a tour poster that started to flesh out the concert trek her fans have been holding their breath for. It’s going to be called the “Cowboy Carter Chitlin’ Circuit Tour.” Though neither dates nor ticket sale information has been announced at the time of this post, it appears to be headed to the nine cities named on the poster.

Philadelphia is not one of them. Instead, in order from top to bottom, they are: Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Houston, Washington, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.

Can this really Bey true? Is Beyoncé forsaking Philadelphia? Officially, that remains to be seen. It appears, though, that initially this tour — which references the Chitlin Circuit, the network of clubs and theaters including the Uptown Theater on North Broad Street that presented Black performers in a segregated era in U.S. history and well into the 1960s — will play a limited number of cities, perhaps with extended residencies in each.

That would be in line with a trend in the concert industry that limits travel for the production of large tours, such as Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour,” which parked itself in each tour stop for a three-day weekend’s worth of shows before moving on, or Harry Styles’ “Harry’s House Tour” in 2022, which played 15 shows in New York and 12 in Los Angeles.

» READ MORE: Sabrina Carpenter, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Bradley Cooper, and Adam Blackstone are Philly Grammy winners

So it appears that rather than coming to the BeyHive in every major city, Queen Bey will have her fans swarm to her, with the East Coast covered with possible extended stays in New York and D.C., the South accommodated in Atlanta and her hometown of Houston, and Europe taken care of in London and Paris.

That would make sense production wise, considering the likely massive scope of the show. If the tour is going to look anything like the oversize spectacle that Beyoncé put on during a halftime show at a Houston Texans game in Christmas Day — now viewable on Netflix as Beyoncé Bowl — it will be quite a challenge to move all those people, props and horses, from city to city on tour.

As we await details, and it seems that she will not be coming to Philly, all I can say is: Bummer. But hey, at least she doesn’t appear to be going to Boston either. And of course, further info about the extent of the tour could allay fears. But for now, it sure looks like Philadelphia is not going to get a Beyoncé show.

Another possibility: Made in America, Jay-Z’s Labor Day weekend in Philadelphia music festival that has not been presented for the last two years, hasn’t yet announced whether it will be returning in 2025. If it does, what better way to make its way back than with Beyoncé riding down the Ben Franklin Parkway on her white steed to take the stage in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art?