Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill’s album of the year wins all came in the 1990s. Beyoncé’s fifth shot, for “Cowboy Carter,” arrives Sunday night.
Six months before she would become the first Black woman nominated for album of the year at the premiere Grammy ceremony in 1959, the jazz great Ella Fitzgerald was loose, candid and confident about her relationship to craft.
“I’m feeling so good these days, so ambitious,” she said in a November 1958 interview with the critic Ralph Gleason. And who could blame her? At that point, the much-beloved “first lady of song” was renowned as a formidable musician capable of wedding dulcet melody with Olympian improvisational techniques. And in the late ’50s, Fitzgerald had made a gutsy pivot: Her nomination came for the double album “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook,” an entry in a series with the producer Norman Granz. Starting with a collection of Cole Porter songs, these were major excavations into the nature of American culture itself.
“The Irving Berlin Songbook” was a swoony, assured set where Fitzgerald yet again used the album format to effectively invite herself to the ball, wedging her way into a world of standards evocative of midcentury racial and class homogeneity. She lost to Henry Mancini’s “The Music From Peter Gunn” soundtrack. All her fellow nominees were white men.
A 14-year drought for Black women album of the year nominees ensued, which lasted until the 1974 awards, where Roberta Flack received a nod for the ravishing “Killing Me Softly.” But a Black woman wouldn’t win this trophy for two more decades — not until 1992, when Natalie Cole was honored for her crisp and elegant conversation with the legacy of her father, Nat King Cole, on “Unforgettable … With Love.” That means no Supremes, no Dionne Warwick, no Aretha Franklin, no Diana Ross or even Donna Summer during the first fever-pitch high of her disco superstardom (though her “Bad Girls” album broke another no-nomination dry spell in 1980).
On Sunday, Beyoncé will compete for the award for the fifth time, for “Cowboy Carter,” an album of audacious multigenre reach that includes meditations on, among other things, Jim Crow’s cultural arm in the recording industry. If she triumphs over André 3000, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Jacob Collier, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift, she will become just the fourth Black woman to win the category. Following Cole, only Whitney Houston (1994) and Lauryn Hill (1999) have taken home the show’s top prize.
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