Clever, beautiful and sonically witty: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album reviewed

Carter is a useful surname to have if you’re making a country album. So it is with Beyoncé: she married into the name when she got hitched to Jay-Z, but he is from New York, not Poor Valley, VA. Helps if you’re from Texas too – just to convince folks that this bit of genre-hopping is rooted in authenticity.

It isn’t – but who cares? This is a clever, beautiful and sonically witty album. Country music’s conventions draw out of Beyoncé perhaps the most sublime melodies she has written, or part-written. There are cameos from Dolly Parton, half-forgotten black sharecropper’s daughter Linda Martell, Willie Nelson and the ghost of Chuck Berry, but – the last excepted – they don’t add much to this sprawling but magnificent double album.

‘Texas Hold ’Em’ has amassed more than 250 million downloads on Spotify and may end up being her most successful single. It’s great, an R&B inflected hoedown.