Reba: My Story (17 page)

I especially remember one visit the boys made when Charlie and I were living in the Chockie Shack. Naturally, I wanted very much for them to like me as Charlie’s wife and as their stepmother. I was nervous, though I looked forward to their visit, and had made special efforts to make our little house as neat and as homey as possible.

One morning, Lance, Coty, and Charlie got into the pickup to go feed cattle. When I heard the engine running, I came out of the house, heading to the truck intending to go along. Charlie and I had always fed cattle together, in any and all weather conditions. We were a ranching team, and that was something that was as much a part of our lives as rodeo and singing.

Until that day.

“Where’re you going?” Charlie asked me.

His sons were looking at me from inside the pickup.

“I’m going to feed with you,” I said, and my voice took an “of course” tone.

“There’s not enough room,” Charlie said. He closed the pickup’s door, and he and his sons drove away. I’ll never know why Charlie didn’t say, “I think the boys and I need a little time together today.” I could have accepted that. Or, better yet, “Climb in” or “Scoot over, boys! There’s room for everybody.” Instead, he just left me standing there watching while the taillights faded off into the distance.

That just broke my heart.

W
E WERE STILL LIVING IN THE CHOCKIE SHACK WHEN I HAD MY
first Top Ten record. Here’s how it happened: Earlier in the year, I had gone to an estate sale and wound up buying a deepfreeze that was full of blackberries. The lady selling it had gathered and frozen them that spring.

So one afternoon I was setting out to copy one of Grandma Smith’s famous blackberry cobblers, when the phone rang.

It was Jerry Kennedy.

“Hey, Reba, what are you doing?” he said.

“Hey, Jerry,” I said. “I’m cookin’, what do you know?”

Long-distance telephone connections aren’t the best in southeastern Oklahoma. Besides that, I was paying more attention to that cobbler and really wanted it to turn out right, so I was watching it carefully. Our oven’s heat was uneven. The thermostat was out of whack, and I couldn’t rely on the timer. I had to cook by sight the way some musicians play by ear.

Jerry told me he had a “monster song,” music business slang for a giant hit record. Of course, I wanted the lowdown right away, but my cobbler was about to burn.

So I had to call him back. When I did, through the
scratch of rural long distance, I first heard “You Lift Me Up to Heaven.”

I highly respected Jerry’s ear for a song. If he liked it, most usually I recorded it, and he rarely steered me wrong. This time was no exception. “You Lift Me Up to Heaven” was my career-making record. It went to number eight on the
Billboard
charts.

It looked like I was finally getting someplace.

I
THINK CHARLIE WOULD HAVE BEEN CONTENT TO LIVE IN THE
Chockie Shack all his life. The rent was cheap, $10 a month, which was important because Charlie had come into our marriage $40,000 in debt.

It wasn’t his fault—he had gone into a partnership to buy some cows with a relative who couldn’t pay his part. To make things worse, the mama cows didn’t perform as expected. I won’t go into the efforts that a lending institution made to collect the money from Charlie, who would have paid if he’d had it. But he was flat broke. I’ll just say Charlie’s inability to pay back the $40,000 was putting him under big pressure.

So I went to Daddy on Charlie’s behalf. Charlie didn’t want to borrow money, and Daddy wasn’t eager to loan it. Instead, we struck a deal: Daddy would pay the bank note and Charlie and I would pay him back largely by working for him on the ranch. One winter, Daddy and Mama went to Florida to buy cattle, and every week they would send a load back home, where we’d receive them, straighten them up, and put them out to pasture. It was so cold, Charlie and I would be almost frozen, trying to save the life of a yearling that had just been shipped hundreds of miles to Oklahoma from Florida. It sure was hard on them.

Charlie and I would give the cattle worm medicine and their shots for various diseases. We’d try to mainline a steer, but the needles would freeze up. We’d blow into the needles to try to clear them; if any spit got into the needle,
it would freeze up by the time we got it into the vein. If the spit didn’t freeze, then the medicine would. When we finally got the cattle straightened up, we’d brand and castrate them and watch them for a week to be sure they were okay. The sick ones would go in a separate pen. When all the cattle were healthy, they were put out into the main pasture.

It was hard work, but that was something I had done most of my life.

S
TILL, BY OUR FOURTH YEAR OF MARRIAGE, I HAD BEGUN TO
dream that Charlie and I could have a house of our own, not that we were even thinking of looking for one. Up to this point, our household income was still coming from Charlie’s rodeoing, my singing about three nights a month, and my checking records for an oil-lease company out of Oklahoma City at Coalgate. And, of course, we were still helping Daddy to repay our loan.

But then I heard that my cousin Rickie’s place in Stringtown might be for sale. We were on our way home from a trip to Fan Fair in Nashville—my cousins Rickie Thompson and Paula Daniel, our friend Jan Lancaster, and I—in Jan’s Cadillac, “Ole Fred,” when Rickie casually mentioned it.

Rickie and her husband, Loyd, were living outside of Stringtown on 225 acres. It was a beautiful place, with pine trees and the Chickasaw Creek running through it. I’d always loved it. I thought of the place as Stringtown’s answer to the Ponderosa Ranch, and I became very excited.

“Well, Rickie,” I said, “what do you think you’d want for your place?”

Rickie said she’d talk to Loyd and told me to talk to Charlie.

Charlie was spreading gravel on the driveway at the house when I approached him.

“Charlie, turn off the tractor,” I said anxiously.

He did.

“What is it?” he said.

“Let’s go down and visit with Rickie and Loyd,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“They’re wanting to sell their place.”

“We can’t afford it,” he said, and turned the tractor back on.

“Turn it off,” I shouted above the engine. “Let’s talk about this. I think we can get the money if we go down to the Federal Land Bank in Durant and use my contract with Mercury as collateral,” I said. “That might pull some weight. Why don’t we just go over and look at the place and go talk to the bank?”

Charlie wasn’t into the idea at all at first. He was afraid to get any deeper into debt. But at least he agreed to explore getting a bank loan.

Borrowing money against a recording contract in Nashville is one thing, because bankers are familiar with the collateral. Trying to borrow money in Durant, Oklahoma, in the 1970s against a contract that said you were obliged to sing for an income was something else. I’m sure the banker had never seen a recording contract, much less loaned against one.

“It’s against my better judgment,” the banker said. “I’ll never get my money back. But I’m going to give you this loan.”

The bank got its money back to the penny. We had an installment loan, and I made it my priority over all our other monthly payments. I can’t say for sure how much money we borrowed from the Federal Land Bank. My collaborator, Tom Carter, asked Charlie, at my request, to talk about the particulars of our finances for this book. It seemed only fair for him to be able to give his side of everything. But Charlie refused.

In late June 1980, we moved into that beautiful ranch
house in Stringtown. We had three bedrooms, running water, no mice, and a ceiling that stayed in place.

I was determined to have a housewarming party on the Fourth of July. I hung curtains, pictures, put groceries into the refrigerator and plates and glasses in the kitchen cabinets, and did all the rest that goes with a move from one house to another. All my family came over, and we ate homemade ice cream and swam in our new pond. I can still remember feeling the muddy bottom between my toes and the rush of pride that you get when you really have a nice place of your own.

B
Y 1980, I WAS TRYING TO DEVELOP SOMETHING OF AN
“
ORGANIZATION
.” Red Steagall was sort of my career manager, and Pake was my road manager, though he was getting tired of the job. Eventually, he decided to leave and asked Preecher Williams to replace him. But he wanted to be sure my affairs were lined up before he did.

At that point, we were putting together another band. It included Preecher on drums, my sister Susie doing harmony, and Charkie Christian on lead guitar. Pake played bass, and we felt that we needed a steel guitar player, so we called Red Steagall, who recommended Gary Carpenter.

Gary had another job and recommended someone none of us knew. His name was Narvel Blackstock.

At that point, Narvel was an insurance agent who played music on the side. He had been married at sixteen and had three beautiful children by the time he was twenty-one. And he loved music enough to drive from Burleson, Texas, to Chockie, Oklahoma—three and a half hours each way—then two hours each way to Nowata, Oklahoma, where I was scheduled to play a dance at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. Imagine traveling eleven hours, sight unseen, to try out a gig with a girl singer you’d barely heard of and who’d only recorded one song that you had never heard.

The job paid $150, with no per diem—that’s an allowance of so much every day for living expenses. Narvel would be lucky to clear one hundred dollars for a job requiring about twenty hours, including travel, rehearsal, and performance time—which is one reason why band members for up-and-coming singers, then and now, come and go. Yet Narvel was all gung ho. He even quit his steady job before he joined me!

I’ve been thankful ever since that he did.

Even as a child, Narvel’s desire was to become a professional musician. I think it’s really fascinating that he began playing steel guitar when he was eight. The steel guitar, with its foot and knee pedals, is one of the most complicated of all the stringed instruments. Narvel began his career playing in Pentecostal churches, going on the road with a gospel quartet about the time he began to shave. He missed most Fridays and Mondays of his secondary education, traveling all day Friday to a Friday night concert or church service and all day Monday coming home from a Sunday night engagement.