In August, 29-year-old country singer Shaboozey gave a packed audience at the Grammy Museum advice on how to stay healthy on the road.

When he plays his big hit A bar song (Tipsy) he takes a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The two have “a history,” he shouts in the song’s chorus.

But after one particularly loud show, Shaboozey recalled a manager pulling him aside backstage. “They said, ‘You know, you can put iced tea in there,'” the singer said, laughing.

Later that night, when he performed the song twice in a row, he did indeed pull out a bottle of Jack for the big moment. Who knows what was actually in it, but if it was whiskey, Shaboozey definitely deserved a real shot.

The singer-songwriter, raised in Virginia to Nigerian-American parents, has been named country artist of the year and appeared on Beyoncé’s Cowboy driver and dominant graphs with A bar song (Tipsy). His LP Where I’ve been is not where I’m going belongs on every list of the year’s most important land records.

Shaboozey has been embraced by the country’s establishment, but as a young black man in America’s most conservative music format, he has no illusions about that. His songwriting is uplifting and melancholic in a way A bar song (Tipsy) hardly suggests. Will country fans stick around for the real thing after his boisterous rise on the back of a huge hit?

“I’ve been going to Stagecoach for years, walking through there and nobody knows who you are, and you’re one of the only people of color at that whole festival,” he said. “Who would have thought that same guy would be playing to 60,000 screaming people two years later.”

Collins was born Chibueze and his stage name is a variation on the nickname he was given by a high school football coach who couldn’t spell his name correctly.

In person, he is tall and imposing, still with the muscular build of a young athlete, but also the soft-spoken baritone of someone who has worked many complicated feelings into his songs.

That day, A bar song (Tipsy) still topped the charts, making Shaboozey perhaps the most talked about singer in the most influential genre in America right now.

The single is devilishly perfect in its craft: it discreetly refers back to J-Kwon’s 2004 hit Tipsya party classic for older millennials. The chorus is exuberantly singable on a night out, but the lyrics are tougher than you might think (“Gas and groceries, the list goes on/ This 9 to 5 ain’t working, why am I working so hard?”).

Country and rap, historically pitted against each other, have always been cousins, their sounds having become closely intertwined in recent years. Shaboozey understood both as a common point of reference for younger country fans, and used that sweaty party anthem for a sly twist on the drinking song tradition.

“It’s just a staple of country music, the drinking song,” Shaboozey said. “But I knew the world was looking for something unique. Y2K is coming back, everyone’s already playing 2000s music, and Tipsy was a big party song. So you kind of fill it up, this equation, just in time for summer. I feel like we checked all the boxes, but we put a lot of work into it to be ready for a moment like that.”

That moment paid off across formats, topping the country airplay charts when like-minded songs from Lil Nas X (Old Town Road) and Beyoncé (Texas Hold’em) never came close.

However, it was the call to collaborate on Beyoncé’s concept album, which played on the black roots of country music and the position black people occupied as outsiders in a country, that changed his life.

Shaboozey brought a regal, trap-infused croon to the banger Spaghettiand a smooth R&B run to Sweet Honey Buckiin’every highlight of Beyonce’s Cowboy driveran album that testifies to a black culture intertwined with American cowboy archetypes.

“I felt like I was where I was supposed to be,” he said. “You’re not put there to be nervous. You’re there to do what you do best.”

Shaboozey admired Beyoncé for taking the risk of making a country-inspired album with no guarantee that Nashville would embrace it (reaction to her bombshell performance with the Chicks at the CMAs in 2016 was mixed, to say the least).

“We agree that we see the mirrors between hip-hop and country, and that being black and being an outlaw,” Shaboozey said. “Having to protect yourself, being forced to band together to survive.”

Shaboozey’s own upbringing was in some ways quintessentially American: he grew up in the quiet town of Woodbridge, Virginia, and was fascinated by the country music his Nigerian father loved.

He discovered deeper connections between his parents’ West African culture and the Americana they had adopted.

“I think there’s the folklore, the storytelling aspect that you see in West African music, that’s a huge part of country music as well,” he said. “The banjo obviously has African roots. Country music came from people in the South and Appalachia, slaves and indentured servants from Europe, all collecting and sharing stories.”

Shaboozey’s album is filled with connections between all corners of Black and Southern Americana. Will the Nashville establishment welcome the full picture?

“Especially after Beyoncé, his sound is taking the country format in a direction that is very relevant now,” says Amanda Marie Martinez, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the intersection of race and country music.

Black acts like War and Treaty and Mickey Guyton have received critical acclaim, but “country radio still dictates business practices and the gatekeepers have power,” she says. “If you look back from Charley Pride to Darius Rucker to Kane Brown, Nashville has typically only allowed one black man to be successful at a time, and that’s troubling. There’s never been a black woman with sustained commercial success on country radio. It’s not a pleasant reality, but the only template is not to talk about anything controversial about being a black man in country.”

Shaboozey, for his part, said Nashville’s elite are open to his vision.

“When I went there, I think there was just a lot of people trying to write good music,” he said. — TCA