Could have been Beyoncé’s first country song. It seems like the pop superstar’s time in country music is pretty much over, after she made quite the splash in 2024 (how has it already been two years?) with the release of her “country-inspired” album Cowboy Carter. Of course there was a lot of conversation about whether the album should be considered country (Beyoncé herself said it wasn’t, for the record) and how she was treated by the country music industry. But Beyoncé has long flirted with country music, including her now-infamous appearance with the Dixie Chicks during the 2016 CMA Awards. As it turns out though, one of her earliest singles was actually written to be a country song – and inspired by a legendary country hit. Beyoncé scored her fourth solo #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Irreplaceable” back in 2006, from her second studio album B’Day. The song was written by Beyoncé along with Tor Erik Hermansen, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Espen Lind, Amund Bjørklund and Shaffer Smith – better known as R&B artist Ne-Yo. Ne-Yo has been spending a lot of time in Nashville lately, even making his Grand Ole Opry debut ahead of the release of his country-inspired album Highway 79. But the R&B singer has long been a country fan, even revealing as far back as 2008 that he was inspired by country artists like Faith Hill and Shania Twain while writing “Irreplaceable.” But there’s one country song in particular that he credits for his love of country music – and his inspiration when it comes to songwriting. Recently, Ne-Yo sat down with the Zach Sang Show, where he revealed how hearing country legend Reba’s 1990 hit “Fancy” inspired his approach to writing his own music: “I’ve been a fan of country music for a long time. This goes back to living in Las Vegas, my mom, my sister, you know, my grandmother, five aunts, me, right? And my mom worked in and out of pretty much any casino you could think of, and she was everything from a janitor to a dealer to cocktail waitress to like just a bunch of jobs so that we weren’t in the ghetto pretty much. So I would wait for her to come home every night, which was like super duper late. So I was always late for school because I’d always be tired waiting on her to come home. But she would bring a different genre of music home for us to sit and listen to for, you know, quick 30 minutes every night. I remember the first night she brought home Reba McEntire’s ‘Fancy.’ Man, that song had me in a chokehold for like three years. The song is like a tragic story, but it’s a beautiful story at the same time. And her voice and just the whole nine. So I was hooked from that moment.” Ne-Yo says he carried that inspiration into his writing career, from his first hit “So Sick” to writing “Irreplaceable” which ultimately ended up being recorded by Beyoncé: “So fast forward into my my writing career. If you think about ‘So Sick,’ the only thing that makes ‘So Sick’ a pop song is the music. Like if you take the production, you take those lyrics and put it over a slide guitar, it becomes a country song. Same thing with Beyonce’s Irreplaceable. You take the drums off and it’s just a guitar. It’s a country song. … It’s about the storytelling element of it. It’s about the vulnerability of it. These are the elements of country that I took from country music and incorporated it into whatever else I was doing.” If you’re interested in hearing how “Irreplaceable” would sound as a country song, bluegrass group The Cleverlys actually recorded their own version of the Ne-Yo-penned tune: Could I hear Reba singing it? I mean, she’s already recorded her version of Beyoncé’s song “If I Were A Boy,” so I think she could probably do something with this one too. The post You’ll Never Guess Which Legendary Country Song Inspired Beyoncé’s Hit “Irreplaceable” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.