Beyoncé Makes History With No. 1 Album and No. 1 Single on the UK Official Charts

Beyoncé has made history on the British charts, as her March 29 release Cowboy Carter makes her the first Black artist to hit No. 1 with a country album on the UK’s Official Albums Chart.

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Additionally, she also has the U.K.'s No. 1 single with "Texas Hold 'Em," thus cementing the achievement as the first artist ever to attain a U.K. Official Chart "double' with a country album and a country single.

According to the Official Charts Company, Cowboy Carter leapt to the summit with 40,000 chart units, and "Texas Hold 'Em" returns to the Official Singles Chart in its fifth non-consecutive week, dislodging Benson Boone's "Beautiful Things," for the No. 1 position.

Beyoncé is no stranger to an Official Chart double. She held the Official Albums and Singles charts simultaneously in 2003 with her debut solo album Dangerously In Love (which went 4x Platinum, according to the British Phonographic Industry) and the single "Crazy in Love" ft. Jay-Z, which went 3x Platinum.

The current environment surrounding her acceptance into country music has see-sawed from face palms to open arms. Beyoncé bluntly acknowledged the difficulties she's faced since she released 2016's "Daddy Lessons" from her critical and commercial success Lemonade. While she took to the stage with the Chicks at that year's Country Music Association Awards to perform the song, the CMAs received backlash for the performance, wiped the set from their online portal, and then received even more negativity for seemingly caving in and finally reinstated the video on their site.

Back in the U.S., Cowboy Carter is all but assured to land on top the Billboard 200 when numbers are released early next week. More than 350,000 equivalent album units of the record will likely be sold in the week following its release on Friday, March 19, Hits Daily Double reported. The LP is also expected to rack up between 250 and 300 million streams.

That includes a record-setting 76 million Spotify streams on the day of the album's release. No other LP released on the platform this year has performed that well.

Onetime Beatle Paul McCartney was among the album's many admirers, lauding her cover of his standard "Blackbird." "I am so happy with (Beyoncé's) version of my song 'Blackbird,'" McCartney said in an Instagram post on Thursday, April 4. "I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place," he added.