Herb Jeffries, Hollywood's first black cowboy singer, would have loved Beyoncé

In 1935, Herb Jeffries was a jazz singer touring with Earl Fatha Hines and his band across the American South. As Jeffries recalled in a documentary about his life, during a break between sets one night, he and the other musicians stood at the stage door and watched a group of children playing in the alley run away, leaving a crying boy behind. Jeffries asked him if the others had hurt him. No, they're my friends, replied the young boy, but they were playing cowboy and they won't let me be Tom Mix. Herb Jeffries asked why, and the boy's voice cracked as he replied: Because Tom Mix isn't black.

Westerns were the most popular film genre of the 1930s, with plots offering escapism, romance, and adventure amid the Great Depression. Audiences of all types gathered in theater aisles and balconies to watch stars like Mix embody the Hollywood myth of the cowboy as a timeless, heroic figure. Yet movie theaters were still segregated, and black and brown audiences watched actors and storylines that did not reflect their realities. Historically, it is estimated that one in four cowboys of the American West was black, and according to Kendall Nelson, author of Gathering the Leftovers: A Tribute to the Working Cowboy, one on three was a Mexican vaquero. It wasn't until Herb Jeffries became the first singing cowboy to play a Western hero who didn't identify as white that audiences saw that heritage represented on screen.

Herb Jeffries was born Umberto Valentino in 1913. From the moment he was born, he didn't know exactly where he fit in. Her mother, Fern, was Irish and her Sicilian-Moorish father had died in World War I before she was born. Fern, a seamstress, was pregnant with her son when she fell in love with Howard Jeffrey, an Ethiopian presser in her shop. Together, Fern and Howard overcame pervasive intolerance and honored their relationship by marrying before interracial marriage was legally recognized by the United States. Young Jeffries called Howard his father and took his name (later changing it to Jeffries). Growing up in Detroit in the early 1920s, he found his identity and community in the diversity of his neighborhood, stating in the 2008 documentary: A Colorful Life: The Story of Herb Jeffries, We had many races living there and we all got along just fine without money. […] We had a lot of Jews there. We had, as we were called at that time, negroes, who lived there.

Duke Ellington and his orchestra with Herb Jeffries in 1941.

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As a young man, Jeffries was drawn to music that reflected the mix of cultures he grew up with, and no genre reflected the diversity of America as excitingly as jazz. In what almost seems like a Jazz Age myth, Jeffries was discovered playing in a speakeasy by Louis Armstrong, who told him he should leave Detroit and hit the road. Over the years, Jeffries made a name for himself as a jazz singer famous for his elegant phrasing and easy-going personality. Then he met another person who changed the trajectory of his life, the young boy he talked to who wanted to be Tom Mix.

Assuming there's a cowboy paradise, Jeffries is probably listening Cowboy Carter in rehearsal. With his eighth solo studio album, Beyonce examines the contemporary landscape of America as she sits side-saddle on a white stallion. In 27 tracks, she traces a path through country music of yesterday and today, reterritorializing certain well-trodden roads. Like Jeffries before her, Beyoncé's identity as a performer is intrinsic to the social justice she embodies.

Cowboy Carter is punctuated by interludes from KNTRY Radio, an imaginary station hosted by Willie Nelson. We listen to the musical innovators of the past through a time-traveling transistor radio: blues pioneer Charles Andersons blue yodel, Mississippi legend Delta Blues Son House, and one of rock and roll's greatest ancestors, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It is all American country music, Beyoncé seems to say. His album weaves like a barrel racer through the genres of rhythm and blues, gospel, hip-hop and country western, fusing them all together. Beyoncé said that Cowboy Carter was inspired by her experience of feeling excluded from country music as a black artist. However, it would be a disservice to the work to consider it a simple step backwards; it's not so much an answer as a reorientation for a public poorly informed about the origins of cowboy culture.