Reba: My Story (11 page)

I agree. I truly think the unlikely formation of a band that successful from a school district that small was an act of God. But, while I do have sentimental memories about the group, I can’t really vouch for its musical greatness. Recently someone said to Pake, “That band was popular, but was it any good?”

“We thought that Nashville was going to be coming into that cafeteria and signing us all any day,” Pake said.

“Did you ever make a demo or anything?”

“No,” Pake said, “but we made a tape one time.”

“Have you listened to it since?”

“I listened to it about five or six years ago,” Pake said. “It sounded like a train wreck.”

A
LONG WITH SINGING, BASKETBALL, RODEOS, AND
school, I still helped out on the ranch, as we all did. My responsibilities continued even after I left for college. Not that I minded—as you know by now, it takes a lot of hands to run a ranch, and besides, I understood that a college tuition would put my folks under considerable economic strain. I did get some financial aid—fifty dollars a semester—but Daddy and Mama had to pay the rest. Although they would eventually reach a level of financial comfort as Daddy parlayed his rodeo earnings into new tracts of land and more cattle, it was a slow build and I wanted to do my share.

I went to college in Durant at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where my major field of study was elementary education and my minor was music. I received my bachelor’s degree, but never taught school as my Mama and Grandma had done before me, except for student teaching.
Alice earned a degree in home economics and Susie in business. None of us ever worked a day in our fields of study.

Pake dropped out of college, but it was just as well. The only degree he could have earned would have been in partying.

D
URANT IS ONLY ABOUT FIFTEEN MILES FROM CADDO, OKLAHOMA
, where Daddy ran two or three hundred steers on some land he leased. “Reba,” Daddy said, “it’s more handy for you to drive fifteen miles every other day to feed those steers than it is for me to drive forty-five.”

I said I would do it.

Daddy bought me a black Ford pickup when I graduated from high school. It had an orange and black interior and looked like a mobile pumpkin. It had a standard transmission, AM radio, but no air-conditioning. Every other day, I would load about thirty fifty-pound sacks of feed into that truck by myself and feed Daddy’s steers.

I never lost one steer in the three and a half years it took me to earn my undergraduate degree.

The most fun I had while taking care of the cattle was when my roommates and buddies would go with me. One of my roommates, Cindy Blackburn, was a beautiful girl who was always dressed to the max and was a member of one of the campus sororities.

One day, Brenda Lee, my first roommate in college and best friend since the fifth grade, Karen Watkins, my downstairs neighbor at college, Cindy, and I went to Caddo to feed the steers. We’d had a pretty good rain the day before.

The dirt in Caddo, Oklahoma, turns to black, gummy mud when it gets wet, and it’s real easy to get stuck. I was driving and the girls were in the back of the truck when I hit a boggy spot. The tires started spinning and we began to slow down. I hollered at the girls to jump out and push.
Brenda and Karen had done that before, so they knew better than to listen. They stayed in the truck, but Cindy jumped out in her sorority sweatshirt and saddle oxfords and began pushing with all her heart.

When we got out of the boggy spot, I looked back and Cindy was standing there—feet apart, arms out, and covered in black mud. From then on, she always rode in the front of the truck.

I kept a horse at college so I could keep him in shape for weekend rodeos. I went to some college shows and PRCA rodeos. One of my sophomore-year roommates, Beth Crump, also had a horse at college. We had a lot of fun with that.

O
F COURSE, MY FAMILY WAS STILL AN IMPORTANT PART OF MY
social life, college or no college. And I was dating a few guys—having my first serious, grown-up romances.

I had always been very naive about guys. I usually didn’t even know if their advances were directed toward me. “Nobody ever hits on me,” I used to say to Alice. I don’t know if I was proud or curious about that.

Alice would try to remind me about a man or a place where someone had made a pass. I never knew what she was talking about. I rarely even remembered seeing the guy.

Still, I had a few boyfriends. I can recall vividly each of my high school and college ones. In high school, there had been Doug Hull, who was a good-looking rodeo bulldogger and very good at sports. After ten months, I broke up with him for Kelly Rhyne. Then Kelly broke up with me and I started dating Rick Wilson, a guy from Hartshorne, Oklahoma, who took me to my senior prom.

Rick and I met on a blind date. On our third date, he proposed to me. We dated off and on after I graduated from high school and broke up during my freshman year of college.

After I had been in college for a couple of years, he called from New Jersey and said, “All right, I’m going to fly in and pick you up and we’re going to get married in Dallas and go on a honeymoon in Hawaii.”

His timing was bad, as I had been partying the night before. His call came about 7
A.M.

“Rick,” I said, “I’m not going to get married. I’m having way too good a time in college. Don’t call back.”

And I hung up.

The telephone rang almost instantly.

“Don’t you ever hang up on me again!” he shouted.

“Rick,” I said, “I love you like a brother, but I don’t want to get married. Good-bye.”

Rick had been a jockey long before I met him. With Mama or with his parents, I had watched him ride at Ruidoso, New Mexico; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and Henryetta and Stroud, Oklahoma. Eventually he made it into the major leagues of horse racing. Funnily enough, in 1993, when Narvel and I were at the Aqueduct Racetrack in New York City, to watch one of our thoroughbred horses run, our agent Jimmy Gladwell said, “Now, Reba, your jockey today is a guy I think you know.”

“What?” I said.

“All the other jockeys said you used to date this guy,” Jimmy continued.

“What’s his name?” I said.

“Rick Wilson.”

I couldn’t believe it. I saw him down at the paddock area before the race, and we gave each other a big hug. And wouldn’t you just know it—he rode my horse to a first-place finish!

After Rick came Bobby Shillings, who I’d met at college. He was good-looking, but somewhat of a renegade—not quite what Daddy and Mama had in mind for me for matrimony.

One time Bobby and I were going to Mama and Daddy’s house at Chockie but first stopped in Stringtown,
where my sister Alice was living. No one was home. I figured everyone was at Mama and Daddy’s, so I decided to have a little fun. I called up there and Susie answered the telephone.

“Susie,” I said, “tell Mama that me and Bobby are going to Shreveport, Louisiana, to get married. I’ll see you later.”

And I hung up.

Susie liked to have died. She started crying, and went to Mama and told her what I had said.

Mama was a little more calm. She called the Highway Patrol to have Bobby and me picked up. Bobby and I didn’t know about all the commotion I’d started, and just calmly drove up to Mama’s house.

“Here they come!” Susie yelled, and everybody met us at the door. Susie couldn’t talk, she was crying so hard. Mama jerked the quirt off the wall. A quirt is a braided leather cord used by jockeys to whip horses. Daddy had gotten it in Mexico.

I was nineteen, and I really thought she was going to whip me with it.

“It was a joke! It was a joke!” I hollered.

“What do you mean scaring your little sister that way?” Mama said.

I felt terrible for Bobby. If he didn’t know before that my family didn’t want me to marry him, he definitely knew then.

And Susie wouldn’t talk to me for a long time after that one.

W
HILE I WAS IN COLLEGE, I CONTINUED TO SING, THIS WAS ALSO
the first time that I’d ever formally studied music. It was new, unfamiliar—and I learned plenty. In music theory class, for instance, we dissected symphonies. In chorus and choral group, we sang a lot of classical music—that was a lot of fun. I also became a member of the Chorvettes, a
singing and dancing group that performed on campus and in neighboring towns. The group still exists, though its members change almost every year. Our leader was my voice teacher, Bob Pratt, whose techniques on breathing and posture have helped me throughout my career. After Bob Pratt died, Mary Ann Craige took over the Chorvettes.

D
URING MY SOPHOMORE YEAR AT SOSU, IN THE SUMMER OF
1974, I had been talking about going up to the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City in December.

Daddy asked me, “Why don’t you get a job up at the Finals? Do something more than just having a big time.”

Now, I think Daddy knew I enjoyed “just going up and having a big time,” but I was getting smart enough to know when he was making a point and that I should pay attention. “What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“Why don’t you sing the National Anthem?” he said.

It seemed like a good idea to me. With “The Star-Spangled Banner,” everyone stands up, stays quiet, and—the best part for any performer—there are 20,000 ears tuned on
you
. So I called Clem McSpadden, a rodeo announcer we’d known for years. He had served in the Oklahoma Senate for eighteen years and had narrowly lost the governorship. At the time he was running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Pake, Susie, and I had helped him campaign by singing at fund-raisers. With Clem’s help, I was hired.

The NFR is the World Series of rodeo, with the top fifteen money-winning cowboys in each event for that year competing for top prize money in Oklahoma City. It was exciting to be there, and while I didn’t know it at the time, it was my first big break.

I’ll never forget how nervous I felt driving up there with Daddy and Mama. What happened on the day we were supposed to rehearse didn’t help my nerves either. I had gone around to the conductor, Al Good, and explained that
I sang the National Anthem in the key of E. He insisted I sing it the way his orchestra played it, in A. From the look on his face I could tell we were gonna do it that night in A.