Back in August, country singer Shaboozey gave the packed audience at the Grammy Museum some advice for staying healthy on the road.

Whenever he plays his smash hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which has topped the Hot 100 for nine weeks and counting, he swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The two have “got a history,” he touts in the song’s chorus.

But after one especially raucous show, Shaboozey, 29, recalled a manager taking him aside backstage. “They said, ‘You know you can put iced tea in there instead,’ ” the singer said and laughed.

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

The singer-songwriter, a Virginia-raised child of Nigerian-American parents, has become the breakout country artist of the year, appearing on Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” and dominating charts with “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” His single has ruled the generalist Hot 100 and country radio alike — a feat not even Beyoncé pulled off. His LP “Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going” belongs on any list of the year’s most important country records.

Shaboozey’s been embraced by country’s establishment, but as a young Black man in America’s most conservative music format, he’s under no illusions about it. His songwriting is bracing and melancholy in ways “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” barely suggests. After his raucous ascent on the back of a huge hit, will country fans stay for the real thing?

“I’ve been going to Stagecoach for years, walking through there when nobody knows who you are, and you’re one of very few people of color at that whole festival,” he said. “Who would have known, like, two years later that same dude is playing to 60,000 people screaming.”

Born Collins Chibueze, his artist name is a riff on a nickname given by a high school football coach who failed at spelling his name right.

In person, he’s tall and commanding, still with the muscular frame of a young athlete, but also the soft-spoken baritone of someone who’s worked out a lot of complicated feelings in his songwriting.

That day, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was still in the saddle atop the Hot 100 and the country airplay charts, making Shaboozey arguably the buzziest singer in the most influential genre in America right now.

The single is diabolically perfect in its craft. It discreetly calls back to J-Kwon’s 2004 hit “Tipsy,” an elder-millennial college-party staple, but does so less as a straight cover than by using the song as a reference point for nostalgia and longing for release.

Country and rap, historically pitted against each other, have always been cousins, whose sounds have intertwined closely over recent years. Shaboozey understood both as a common reference point for younger country fans, using 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 playing 2000’s music already, and ‘Tipsy” was a big party song. So you fill it up a little bit, this equation, just in time for summer. I feel like we ticked all the boxes, but we put a lot of work in to be ready for a moment like that.”

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

This wasn’t an obvious outcome, to say the least. Shaboozey began his music career more overtly rap-aligned, even as his breakthrough single “Jeff Gordon” was named for the NASCAR driver. He released his debut LP, “Lady Wrangler,” on Republic in 2018. He’d moved to LA that year with a record deal and a bit of cash floated from his mother to pursue his dreams, but he didn’t find much community for his country-crossover sound.

His sound inched closer to country instrumentation, like on 2022’s “Why Can’t Cowboys Cry?” off “Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die” on the indie Empire, though nothing hit the Hot 100 or country charts. But the industry took notice behind the scenes. He was driving a friend’s borrowed car around West Hollywood when he got the call that changed his life: Beyoncé wanted him in the studio for a concept album drawing on the Black roots of country music, and the outlaw place that Black people carved out in a country that can still hate and fear them.

Shaboozey brought a regal, trap-infused croon to the banger “Spaghettii,” and a nimble R&B run to “Sweet Honey Buckiin’,” each highlights of an album bearing witness to a Black culture intertwined with American cowboy archetypes.

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

Shaboozey admired Bey for taking the risk to make a country-inspired album with no guarantee of being embraced by Nashville.

“We’re aligned on seeing the mirrors between hip-hop and country, and being Black and being an outlaw,” Shaboozey said. “Having to protect yourself, being forced to band together to survive.”

Shaboozey’s own upbringing was typically American in some ways — a childhood in the slow town of Woodbridge, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., fascinated by his own state’s robust hip-hop tradition (he admires Pharrell Williams’ fearlessness across genres) and the country music his Nigerian dad grew to love here.

He found deeper connections between the West African culture of his parents, and the Americana they adopted.

“I think there’s the folktales, the storytelling aspect that you see in Western African music that’s also a very big part of country music,” he said. “Obviously the banjo’s got African roots too. Country music came from people in the South and Appalachia, slaves and indentured servants from Europe, each gathering and trading stories.”

For his part, Shaboozey said the Nashville establishment has been open to his vision, especially as the genre embraced artists like Jelly Roll and Post Malone, who came out of hip-hop.

“When I went over there, I think it’s just a lot of people just trying to write good music,” he said. “They were super supportive. You create those relationships and you treat people the way you want to be treated, and when they see it, they’re like, ‘Man, we believe in him.’ Good music connects with people. I hope that the success of my song didn’t happen because they felt they needed diversification.”

For now, at least, Shaboozey rules all formats of radio and streaming, and he could be a formidable force at next year’s Grammys, where a young artist updating old traditions with phenomenal commercial success would be poised to do well. This fall, he’ll hit the road for his first major headline tour.

“The thing about the vulnerability that’s happening in music right now is that you’ve got to write honestly if you want to connect with people,” he said. “Noah Kahan told me that he heard that line in ‘Finally Over’ and was like, ‘Man, that hit me too.’ ”