Kevin Bacon covers Beyoncé’s ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’
The Philly born actor and musician has recently played the mandolin and sang Queen Bey's chart topping hit surrounded by barnyard animals
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/5YKGNVOYINFCXEF4KJJLWNFMHE.jpg)
Is Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” a country song?
Of course it is. The single from the forthcoming Renaissance, Act II is loaded with the kind of country tropes that defines the genre.
It saddles up with a cowboy hat on and drinks “rugged whiskey” at an “all night hoedown” while emphasizing the banjo of Rhiannon Giddens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning folk-country artist who has been focused on the hidden history of Black Country music, going back to her beginnings with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
In fact, in terms of semiotic signifiers, “Texas Hold ‘Em” — the work of a real-life Texan, who grew up in Houston, which she refers to as “my city” in the song — is a great deal more “country” than much of the slick, warmed-over pop that populates the country charts.
Now, the Philly-born actor and musician Kevin Bacon has weighed into the Beyoncé debate, musically speaking.
Bacon was inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame last year, as the Bacon Brothers along with his older brother Michael. Back in 2022, they wrote and released “It’s a Philly Thing,” a song of hometown pride about all that entails with residing in the 215.
Followers of the Diner and Footloose star’s Instagram feed know that he often posts videos of him playing music while hanging out with the barnyard animals on the Connecticut farm he shares with his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick.
On Monday, the latest edition in the series caught Bacon and Sedgwick mingling with their ponies and pigs and covering “Texas Hold ‘Em,” in a decidedly countrified version: Bacon plays mandolin and Sedgwick interjects the excitement with energetic cries of “Hoo!”
Despite the convincing musical argument and show of solidarity with Beyoncé, the argument rages on. The commenters on the post are mostly Bacon and Sedgwick fans, but there are still plenty of naysayers and gatekeepers, taking exception to Bacon covering the “non country song” or saying that “Texas Hold ‘Em” is “hideous” and admonishing Beyoncé to “stay in her lane.”
These efforts to police the genre and tell Queen Bey to go back to the R&B-hip-hop world where she came from, have been largely ineffective, thankfully.
“Texas Hold ’Em” was last week’s most-added song on country radio and this week’s chart topper on Billboard’s Hot 100.