Reba: My Story (15 page)

R
IGHT AFTER OUR FIRST SESSION, GLENN KEENER FELL VICTIM TO
a personnel cutback at Mercury. I never worked with him again. I was inherited by Jerry Kennedy, one of Nashville’s top producers, who was a great teacher for such a green talent as myself and later became a great friend. He included me as a part of the family at Mercury and at his home. He used to call me “R-Nell,” short for Reba Nell.

Jerry is famous for taking his craft, but not himself, seriously. One time, when he was producing Jerry Lee Lewis, the studio security guard approached him and said, “Jerry, there’s a carload of people outside who’ve driven here from Connecticut. They say they want to come inside to watch Jerry Lee record.”

Most producers would have told the guard to send them away, and at first Jerry did. But then he found out that, during a show in Connecticut, Lewis had invited everyone
in the audience to come to his recording session in Nashville. Kennedy honored Jerry Lee’s promise.

He also has a sense of humor. I remember us recording a song titled “I’m a W-O-M-A-N.” The song contains a line that says, “It gives me the shivering fits.” I got a little tongue-tied with that and sang, “It gives me the frivering shits.” I jerked my head up to see if someone was gonna say “cut,” “stop,” or anything, but no one did and I finished the song.

When it was over, Jerry said, “That’s a keeper.” I thought my life was over. What would my Daddy say about me recording a song with that word in it? But then they all started laughing. I could take a joke pretty well. Jerry still has the tape.

One time, when I was recording “I’m Not That Lonely Yet,” one of my early Mercury songs, I had brought my niece Garett, Alice’s daughter, to Nashville. It was her seventh-birthday present.

“She was just a typical six- or seven-year-old,” Kennedy recalls, “bouncing off the walls, you know, and having a big time. But Reba was not comfortable.”

Jerry said that I told Garett that her behavior constantly reminded me to take my birth-control pills.

He got a big laugh out of that one.

M
Y NEXT MERCURY SINGLE
, “
NOTHIN
’
LIKE THE LOVE BETWEEN
a Woman and a Man,” came from a session I did with Jerry. It wasn’t released until 1977 and was on the
Billboard
survey only four weeks, peaking at number eighty-six. My third single for Mercury was “Glad I Waited Just for You,” which topped out at number eighty-eight on
Billboard
.

Hitting the
Billboard
charts sounds good, but in fact, I was a flop. Today, an artist can sell 500,000 records and not make it to number one. But in the middle 1970s, he or she could sell as few as 25,000 and have a number-one song.
So, at the rate I was going, I wasn’t making any money for Mercury.

I don’t know why I wasn’t dropped from the label. If that had happened, my career might have ended right there. Many labels are hesitant to sign an artist once he or she has been dropped by another one. But Mercury stood by me, and instead of letting me go, they put out an album. In August 1977,
Reba McEntire
was released. It produced not one significant hit.

When I finally got a Top Twenty song on Mercury, it was a duet with Jacky Ward called “Three Sheets in the Wind.” Jacky was just like a big brother to me, and I loved to do shows with him. I always wished I could talk and tell jokes and funny stories to the audience like he did. When I’d try it, Mama would tell me, “Reba, don’t talk, just sing!”

But that one Top Twenty song didn’t make me a commercial success. In fact, I didn’t earn a royalty check from Polygram-Mercury until 1988, thirteen years after I was signed to the label, and long after I had left.

People have asked me why I think my career took off so slowly when compared to today’s singers. Nowadays, an artist will cut one record, have a hit, and be working for $10,000 a night within a year.

The answer is that the recording industry is totally different today. First, the coverage we get with videos is unbeatable. You’d have to perform in a lot of different cities in front of a lot of people to match the visibility you get from the life of one video. Secondly, TNN, The Nashville Television Network, didn’t exist when I started back in 1976. It’s another wonderful way to showcase new and established acts. I wish we’d had it back then.

Nowadays, country stations are often number one in their markets. That means more people are listening to country music than ever before. And they’re also buying more country music. Currently, the MCA country division, which I’m part of, is the largest branch of MCA Records,
bigger than the pop and rock divisions. That means that country artists get a bigger proportion of the company’s promotional and marketing dollars, so they get much better exposure than we did. Today the record labels will even give country artists financial help on their tours, to purchase buses and to pay their bands, and will even find them management.

It sure wasn’t that way eighteen years ago.

When I was starting out, I had two strikes against me, one because I was female. With the exception of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Barbara Mandrell, and Tammy Wynette, there weren’t many women who were headline acts in country music. Country concert promoters had to “package” several acts just to draw a crowd, and the package usually contained no more than one female act, if any. It’s the general rule: Females don’t sell like the males. I’ve worked a long time to change that theory.

Secondly, I wasn’t famous. Nashville didn’t have the surplus of songwriters in the seventies that it has today, and the good ones wouldn’t pitch their best songs to an unknown. Why blow a possible hit on somebody not selling records when they could have a guaranteed moneymaking hit with a superstar? All the good songwriters were wanting to give their material to George Jones or Tammy Wynette, or Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, whose careers were a lot hotter than mine. But Jerry did his best to find great songs for me. He called me “The Queen of the Waltzes,” because I recorded so many songs back then in waltz tempo. Recently he said that I could “get inside a song better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Fact is, Jerry never gave up on me; and I never gave up on myself. And that’s a piece of hard-won wisdom I’d pass on to anyone wanting to chase a dream.

D
URING THE YEARS AFTER I CUT MY FIRST RECORD, I HAD TO
build an audience the best I could with scattered dates.
Then Red got me a booking agent, his friend Ray Bingham, and in 1978 I found some guys from Coweta, Oklahoma, to back me when they could. When Ray couldn’t book me—and there were times when he booked me without taking a commission just so that I would have a gig—he’d try to get enough work for the band so it could stay together. He put me in VFW halls, rodeos, and honky-tonks—anyplace he could get.

Our biggest-money job was at a fair in Missouri for a “show and dance.” That’s what they were called back then. We’d do three sets of songs from 9
P.M.
until 1
A.M.
On the first set, the people would stand near the stage to listen. The rest of the sets, they’d dance. We got paid $1,500 for the night. I was thrilled.

That’s because many of our dates—and we didn’t have but three or four a month—were at places I can best describe as holes-in-the-wall.

I can remember playing one club in the early 1980s where the cigarette smoke was so thick I couldn’t see the crowd. The “dressing room” was a storeroom with big rolls of carpet on the floor. When we’d go from the stage to the bus and somebody walked on one, a bunch of stinging scorpions would run out.

That night, my bus driver drove me to a grocery store between sets to buy some lemons. I was hoping the juice would cut through all the junk in my throat so it would be clear enough for me to sing. The lemons didn’t help, but it didn’t matter. The crowd was dancing more than listening anyway.

Bingham remembers that in one club where he put me there were almost always two or three fights, always among women.

“Beat all I ever saw,” he says. “No matter how hard they fought, Reba just kept singing right on through it.”

That stemmed from my training with the Kiowa High School Cowboy Band.

A
PERFORMER ALWAYS HAS TO BE ABLE TO IMPROVISE—OR TO
see the humor in any given situation. This is something Red Steagall taught me about.

He and I were playing the “Copenhagen-Skoal Superstars Ropin’ ” in Fort Worth in 1977. Red rode into the arena on horseback wearing a denim suit with maroon velvet insets. “It’s an old Southern gentlemen’s outfit,” he said.

He had told me earlier that he needed a safety pin because he was worried about his zipper busting open. When he jumped off his horse, sure enough, his zipper broke, but he didn’t know it. As he stepped into the spotlight and broke into “Miles and Miles of Texas,” the crowd could see his white drawers shining in the spotlight. And they began to laugh real hard.

“There’s nothing funny about that song,” Red recalls thinking to himself.

Danny Steagall, Red’s brother, who was in the band, began to whisper-shout at me, and got me to yell, “Red, your fly is open,” above the band’s music. He finally heard me and realized for the first time what 7,700 people had been seeing all along.

All Red could do then was to remove that expensive, specially made suit coat, let me tie its arms around his back, and finish his part of the show dressed like that. He looked like he was wearing a maroon apron, and the crowd still seemed to find him funny no matter what he sang.

I
WAS TO SOON HAVE A BAD EXPERIENCE OF MY OWN, AND
looking back on it, it’s still hard to find the humor in it. It was 1978, and I was doing a show, again in Fort Worth, called the “Cowtown Pickin’ Party.” I was the opening act. Ray Wiley Hubbard’s band was supposed to back me,
but they didn’t want to. They had never heard of me before.

“Is there a band here that can back me?” I asked.

“Yes,” I was told, “there is a rock ’n’ roll band.”

“Where are they?”

I met with the players and told them the songs I did. The musicians were truly in agreement. None of them had ever heard any of my tunes.

“Okay,” I said, “do you know ‘Proud Mary’?”