Reba: My Story (16 page)

“Yep,” someone said, “we know that one.”

“Okay, do you know ‘San Antonio Rose’?” I asked.

“Never heard of it,” one of them snapped.

“Do you know ‘Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog’?” I asked, meaning “Joy to the World.”

“Three Dog Night,” one of them said. “We know that song.”

“Great,” I thought silently. “They know two songs.”

So, to fill my time onstage, I told jokes. I’d had three single records out on a major record label, and the high point of my act was a joke about a duck.

“Get off the stage!” someone hollered. “Shut up! Take a hike!”

“Well,” I thought to myself, “they paid me to do thirty minutes, and I’m going to stick to my thirty minutes.”

So I stayed.

Meanwhile, the crowd began to yell for John Conlee, who had a big hit out called “Rose Colored Glasses.” When he came out they burst into applause. I don’t know if they were clapping because he got onstage or because I got off.

I went backstage, crushed. Luckily, Mama was with me. At least I had someone on my side. She was furious at the crowd.

I had not been attracting a great deal of press attention through my little records on Mercury. Lord knows, they tried. But the label’s publicist couldn’t get any publicity on
me because there wasn’t anything to talk about. But on that awful occasion, a reporter happened to show up from the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, one of the largest newspapers in Texas. The reporter had seen and heard the crowd’s response to me.

“Well, are you going to quit the music business?” he wanted to know.

“Quit?” I fired back. “Absolutely not. I’m gonna get a band of my own and never have this problem again.”

And I did.

The following weekend I played in south Texas at a cattle sale, and they had a band called Southern Comfort backing me. I really liked them, and they were interested in becoming my band. The next weekend, when we all played Ardmore, Oklahoma, a new drummer joined them. It was Preecher Williams, who would become my road manager and my mainstay for the next seven or eight years.

N
OW AND THEN, I GOT RAYS OF ENCOURAGEMENT. RAY BINGHAM
’
S
partner, whom he later married, the former Kathy Bee, became my buddy. She liked to ride horses, so we had a lot in common. She helped me fix my hair, and we had a lot of “girl talk.”

One night she and I were in the back of my bus getting me ready for a show when someone knocked on my dressing room door. I was told that Norma Jean was on board and wanted to meet me.

Before Dolly Parton, Norma Jean was the “girl singer” in “The Porter Wagoner Show,” once the highest-rated syndicated television program to come out of Nashville. Norma Jean had recorded twenty-five albums for RCA during the 1950s and 1960s. Dolly Parton has often described how, during her early days with Porter Wagoner, the crowd would call for Norma Jean, who had left the show forever. Dolly would go to the bus and cry.

Naturally, I was a little starstruck by Norma Jean.
Kathy remembers that I raced out of my dressing room with my hair still in curlers to see her. And I was so flattered that she would actually come to my bus to meet me.

In those days, there wasn’t exactly a line of people, in or out of show business, who were trying to get onto my bus.

D
URING THIS TIME, I DID MANAGE TO ACHIEVE ONE OF MY
greatest dreams. I got my first chance to sing on the Grand Ole Opry! I had just signed with a new booking agency, Lavendar-Blake, one of the many I worked with in my early career; and it was the first job they got me. My debut was on September 17, 1977.

Mama, Daddy, and Alice drove all the way from Oklahoma to Nashville to see me, a round-trip of about 1,400 miles. They drove it for a three-minute song.

When we pulled up to the Opry gate, the guard asked if he could help us.

“Yes, sir,” Daddy said, “we got Reba McEntire here and she’s gonna sing tonight on the Grand Ole Opry.”

The guard checked his list.

“Her name’s not on here,” he said.

“What do you suggest we do?” Daddy asked.

“I suggest you turn around and go home,” he said.

“We can’t do that,” Daddy said. “We drove here all the way from Oklahoma.”

But the guard wouldn’t give in.

Daddy turned around onto the service road behind the Grand Ole Opry House on Nashville’s Opryland complex. On the other side of the interstate, we found a phone and I called Dick Blake, my booking agent, at home. Dick, a veteran agent, told us to go back to the guard shack, and by the time we arrived, the guard’s attitude had totally changed.

“Right this way, Mr. McEntire,” he said.

That was one of my first lessons in the power of influence.

The Grand Ole Opry is broken up into thirty-minute performance segments, each with a celebrity host. I was on a portion of the show hosted by Charlie Walker, who sang “Please Don’t Squeeze My Charmin.”

Imagine, I had never had a real hit record, I was living in a broken-down old shack of a house, and here I was with Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, and other country music legends at the world-famous Grand Ole Opry. We were four “proud-to-be-there” Okies!

Backstage, Daddy told me that exactly thirty years before—on September 17, 1947—he had placed in the calf- and steer-roping categories at the Pendleton Roundup in Pendleton, Oregon, and had been named the “All-Around Cowboy of the Rodeo.” What a lucky sign! Maybe I could make history too.

Then I heard about Dolly.

Dolly Parton, one of the biggest stars in the entire entertainment industry, decided to make a surprise appearance on the Opry the night I made my premiere. Most every artist sang two songs on the show, but since Dolly was coming, I was cut back to one. Things could get worse—and they did. I didn’t even get to meet Dolly. I wish I had been told to come back another night.

Dolly looked magnificent, as always. She wore a black pants suit with chiffon, transparent, flowing arms. The outfit was dotted with rhinestone butterflies, Dolly’s trademark. I wore a straight denim skirt with a matching shirt.

Dolly went on, beaming and smiling all over the room. I was totally in awe, since I was still very shy about performing. But having to follow Dolly Parton wouldn’t have been easy even for a veteran.

That’s what I said: follow. I actually had to go on after her!

The Four Guys, a quartet that sings regularly on the
Opry, had to physically help me to the center of the stage when Charlie Walker introduced me. I was that nervous.

I sang “Invitation to the Blues,” which I’d sung on my first LP. I can hardly remember getting through it, but that song was certainly a milestone in my career.

L
OOKING BACK, THE WAY I FELT THE FIRST TIME I SANG ON THE
Opry sort of resembled the way I felt on my first visit there, when I was seven. Mama, Daddy, Aunt Jeannie, Uncle Slim, Pake, Susie, Alice, and I all made the trip from Chockie to Nashville, jammed into Daddy’s old GMC truck with a camper on the back. It was in the heat of summer, and there was no air-conditioning in the camper or cab.

On the way we camped out in a little park on the Oklahoma side of Memphis, where it was hot and muggy and mosquitoes were just eating everybody up. Susie and I, being the two youngest, got to stay in the camper. Everybody else slept out on top of the picnic tables. Aunt Jeannie slept on one of the benches. Then it began to rain and the adults huddled together under one of the tables, using a tarp to create a tentlike cover. But somebody moved and pulled the tarp off, and all the water that had collected on top poured right on Aunt Jeannie. She was drenched.

In Nashville, we stayed in the cheapest hotel we could find on lower Broadway Avenue, close to the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Opry until 1974. I took it upon myself to go exploring and remember standing in front of a souvenir store owned by the late Roy Acuff. Roy’s dobro player and sidekick, Bashful Brother Oswald, stood outside the store handing out free rulers. I remember him handing me a ruler and hugging my neck. I was so excited.

By the time that night’s Opry performance began, Alice and Aunt Jeannie were sick. Alice couldn’t even go to the show. There wasn’t an ounce of ventilation in the hot old building, except for the mild stir of air from people waving fans donated by a funeral home. We were in the
cheapest seats, under the balcony where people spilled soft drinks on those of us below. When a good seat down front became available, someone in my group would take it.

Mama was sitting down in front by the time I became sick too. It must have been something all of us ate. I went down the slanted aisle to tell her, and she told me to go find a bathroom. She never took her eyes off the stage.

I began to run, and then asked an usher where I could find a ladies’ room. I didn’t understand his directions, and I knew I was on the verge of being sick.

So I walked outside. On the front steps of the home of country music and the world’s longest-running radio show, I threw up.

I should have been incredibly embarrassed, but I was too sick to realize it. And things got worse when a stranger walked by and handed me his handkerchief. In my childish innocence, after I wiped my mouth off I offered to give it back.

“No, honey,” he said, “you keep it.”

Those were my introductions to the world-famous Grand Ole Opry!

F
OR A LONG TIME, CHARLIE WAS FAIRLY INDIFFERENT
to my career. He wouldn’t go with me on many of my shows—his attitude was, you do your thing and I’ll do mine. It was almost as though he felt that he was a world-champion steer wrestler, and what was I?

One time, especially, his attitude bothered me. I was supposed to sing at a private party in Fort Worth, Texas. The day came, and it was snowing hard. I called down to Texas to ask if the gig was still on. “Oh, yes,” they told me, “the weather’s fine down here. If you can make it, come on.” I needed Charlie to drive me down to the show. I felt he was more experienced than I was. But he was tied up with something, so I had to drive through the ice storm myself.

Then a turning point came, when I started making money and Charlie slowed down on his rodeo career, when he began to get involved. In the beginning, I was glad to
have his help. My bookings and recording dates were now beginning to escalate, getting to be more than I could comfortably juggle. And equally important to me, his involvement meant fewer separations. It seemed like an extension of the protectiveness that had first drawn me to him. It seemed that sharing something so basic to me—my music—could only bring us closer. And it did, for a while.

But that’s not to say that there weren’t some major chinks in our marriage. One predictable problem was his children. Anyone who has ever been a stepparent knows that it’s not an easy role. Inevitably there are resentments on all four fronts—both parents’, the stepparent’s and the children’s—and most of those resentments are at least partially valid.

So it wasn’t always easy when Lance and Coty, Charlie’s sons by his first marriage, came to visit us on school vacation, in the summers, and on some weekends. Charlie worked hard to get them as much as possible, though once Sherrie advised me to quit bothering them when I was finding out over the phone if we could see the boys. She said, “Go have kids of your own.”