Beyoncé's "Daddy Issues" and the powerful history of black country mothers

Texas.” As horns lead into the opening lines of “Daddy Lessons,” grainy shots of Beyoncé’s native Houston intermingle with images of New Orleans: children walking together, young women laughing on a corner, a black man riding a horse down a city street with his daughter on the saddle in front of him. Beyoncé is on horseback when she first sings the hook of “Daddy Lessons”: “My daddy said shoot, oh my daddy said shoot.” The next lines explain this fatherly advice, which places Bey in the gun-wielding protector role usually reserved for oldest sons: “He taught me to be strong / He told me when I’m gone / Here’s what you do / When trouble comes to town / And men like me come around / Oh my daddy said shoot.” As Beyoncé trails the oooo of her first “shoot” she and her horse ride into the sun’s glare, creating a momentary halo around her braid-crowned head. For this black mama, being angelic doesn’t mean passively enduring the same kind of trouble her father gave her mother—it means, like the biblical angel Raguel, delivering wrath on men for “their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.” Beyoncé is also on horseback for the final chorus of “daddy said shoot,” and expertly sways down and to the right to avoid low-lying pecan branches as she sings “oh my daddy said...” Riding by nut-laden trees isn’t a challenge for this Texan woman, who’s tough as a pecan shell herself. Henrietta Williams Foster, Johanna July, and Beyoncé’s “Daddy Lessons” personae are all black country mothers.