Reba: My Story (8 page)

I don’t know how old I was when I went to my first rodeo. I have a picture of Pake and me in front of a rodeo arena when I was three. But I know I’d been going long before that. And I can date the start of my professional singing life to a rodeo trip we took to Cheyenne, Wyoming, when I was four or five. We were staying at the Edwards Hotel, and back in those days there were no TVs in the room. So everyone visited and hung out in the lobby. My memory of it is as plain as day: There was one television, lots of windows, and green leather couches with brass trim. Cowboys were everywhere.

One afternoon, while we were in the lobby, one of the cowboys asked Pake to sing him a song. Pake sang “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” and got a quarter for it. Not wanting to be left out, I got Pake off to the side and asked him if he’d help me sing a song too. So then I got up and sang “Jesus Loves Me.” Everett Shaw, our family friend and a former world-champion steer roper, paid me a nickel.

Back then was just like today. The girl singer does as much work as the guy but she gets less money for it. I’ve been fighting that all my life!

R
ODEOS WERE ALWAYS A MAJOR SOURCE OF FUN FOR US, BUT
we not only watched them, we learned all the skills. Long before the roping pen on the ranch became our playground, my siblings and I would rope our tricycles, while Mama pretended to be a rodeo announcer, or we’d go down to the cattle guard, sit on the willow bushes, and play like we were riding on a bronc. That old roping pen is gone now—the
new Highway 69 runs right through it—but nothing can ever take away the good times we had there.

All the time I was growing up, Pake would be roping (either team roping, steer roping, or calf roping) and Alice would practice running barrels or poles. Barrel racing is where the horse runs as fast as he can and then virtually stops as fast as he can, turns a barrel and accelerates as fast as he can, then does it twice more. Fifteen hundred pounds of horseflesh sitting on four ankles not much larger than a man’s tries to hurl itself and a rider around barrels three feet in diameter. I started running barrels when I was nine.

A lot of folks don’t realize that a cowboy or cowgirl is only as good as his or her horse. In my case the horse probably knew more about running barrels than I did. The horse has to be trained, which I usually did myself—with help from Daddy, who had come up with a good method for training horses to run barrels.

“Now, Reba,” he told me, “it looks to me like it would be a good idea to set barrels up out in the open—in the pasture—and just walk your horse around them for a few days. Get him real comfortable and agile with the barrels. Then begin to lope him around the barrels for a few days before you take him to the ropin’ pen.”

So I did what Daddy said, and it worked. I used his technique, but I did later on borrow some ideas from other barrel racers when I’d watch them train their horses. That was after I married, and my husband Charlie and I would stay at a rodeo for a day or two, so I’d see the girls put their horses through the barrel pattern. I especially liked the way the world-champion barrel racer for many years, Gail Petska, trained. She’d spin a horse around a barrel, putting its nose right on the barrel, then letting its butt just swing around.

Of course, there were some scary moments in the roping pen. When you rope a calf, your horse stops real fast and jerks the calf down. Then you get off your horse, and while the calf is down, you get hold of him, help him up,
flank him, and put him down on his side so you can tie his legs together. One day Pake was on Ole Brownie roping calves. He got mad at Ole Brownie for not stopping properly and had jumped off to train on him, still dragging the calf tied at the end of the rope. I had enough of that and jumped on Ole Brownie and rode him up to give the calf slack around his neck so it wouldn’t choke him. Pake dragged me off and hit me in the chest, fracturing my sternum. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to having a broken bone.

Another time Pake and his friend Bill Hamilton were team roping and Bill was riding Blue. When Bill was getting ready to rope the horns, the girth broke and Bill fell off and the saddle slid under Blue’s belly. I didn’t think the horse would ever stop. He ran through the back fence before he finally came to a halt. Bill was okay and so was Blue, but both were a little rattled.

But these mishaps were just part of our training, part of the practice that earned us money at rodeos and points at the horse shows. Alice won lots of “All-Around” trophies at the Quarter Horse Shows. She had so many, she used them as doorstops. She even gave me one for Christmas one year, but replaced her award plaque with one that said “#1 Sister.”

Rodeo is simply in the blood of our family. By the time I was eleven, I was already competing in rodeos. My first one was an International Rodeo Association (IRA) rodeo at Atoka, which I entered as a local contestant. It was no secret that I was nervous. Not only was I a beginner, but I also faced the pressure of being a McEntire. Grandpap and Daddy made rodeo history, and Alice and Pake were good performers too. I had a lot to live up to.

I rode Ole Pelican, one of Daddy’s roping horses—all I ever seemed to ride were Daddy’s or Pake’s rejects. Well, I thought I had ridden fast at home, but in the arena I thought I was flying. I probably weighed all of seventy-five or eighty pounds.

Then we got to the first barrel and Pelican stumbled and fell. I fell off into the dirt. I got up on my horse and finished my pattern, spurring as madly as someone competing in the National Finals Rodeo. It felt to me like my legs were flying out far enough to form a right angle with my body.

I didn’t win, but I had managed to finish my first competitive barrel race. I was proud.

I don’t remember what the announcer said, but Daddy told me at the end of my ride, “Reba, you need to kick your horse more.”

“It felt like my legs were out this far, Daddy,” I said, raising my arms. He just walked away.

I
WOULD GO ON TO RUN BARRELS UNTIL I WAS TWENTY-ONE
. I was competing usually in about fifty rodeos a year after I got out of high school, and very seldom I’ll get to run barrels now at home. Looking back, though, I think I was an embarrassment to Daddy because I never did all that well on the rodeo circuit. I was better in the practice pen than I was in competition.

Rodeoing can be so very scary and dangerous. I’ve seen girls run their heads into fences. It’s a wonder that I lasted as long as I did, that I never got hurt. I’d always get so nervous before a competition that I had to struggle to keep from throwing up.

I’ve never been that nervous about singing, even when I’ve sung for millions of people on prime-time, international television, such as on the Academy Awards. But I still get butterflies when I sing the National Anthem or sing at an awards show in front of my peers. And it used to get me when Mama, who is my biggest critic, was in the audience.

But now that I’m a mama myself I realize that she’ll love me regardless of how I do. And I can see that, back then, Daddy did too.

E
VERYONE HAS SPECIAL MILESTONES IN HIS OR HER
life, such as their wedding day or their high school commencement. One of mine was my first day of school.

On that big morning, my shoes, clothes, and the rest of my attire were placed neatly in a line on the back of the couch in the living room so that I could dress close to the old brown heating stove. I wanted to be warm while I slipped from my pajamas into my clothes. The warmth I felt was probably no more than sheer excitement.

We didn’t have kindergarten in the Kiowa public school system, so my primary education began in the first grade in 1961. My teacher was Mrs. Eula Kelly, whom I had met when she taught Alice and Pake. I thought she was one of the nicest women in the world, so it thrilled me when, thirty years later, my collaborator on this book, Tom Carter, tracked her down and learned that she’s a big fan of mine. She is about ninety now, and she smiled and laughed
throughout Tom’s visit until he asked her what she thinks when she sees me on television.

“I’m so proud,” she said. Then she began to cry, bless her heart.

In a way, first grade was the real beginning of my performing career. It marked the first time I ever sang behind a microphone—during a Christmas program held in the high school gymnasium. I sang “Away in a Manger.” I must not have done too badly, because in the second grade, I got an even more challenging assignment—I sang “He” at the high school commencement! That came about because Mama’s friend, Donna Rue Wilson, who lived with us quite a bit during high school, graduated that year. She put in a word for me, and so there I was, seven years old, singing for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. For a little kid, it was pretty scary, but exciting to be the center of attention of so many teenagers that I looked up to.

The commencement address that year was given by our congressman, Carl Albert, who was also the speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Mama remembers that in his speech that night, Congressman Albert commented on Daddy’s success as a roper. Then he predicted that if I kept on, I’d be more successful than my Daddy. So I guess I sang okay!

And I was keeping on. In the second grade, Mrs. Canton, our music teacher and my first piano teacher, put a program together and I sang “My Favorite Things,” from
The Sound of Music
, though I didn’t get to see the movie itself for a few years. Then, in the third grade, I sang “Red Wings” for my teacher Miss Cason’s Thanksgiving program.

I liked singing a lot in those days, but everyone who knew me in school would have thought my favorite activity was lunch. We had the most wonderful cooks at Kiowa, Marie McClendon and Ruby Horn Maxwell. So I would always sit by the weak-stomached kids and would say something unappetizing like, “You wanna play Lookie?” They’d
say, “What’s that?” and I’d say, “Lookie!” They’d look at me and I’d open my mouth. Of course, it would be full of food. Then I would ask them if they were going to eat their cake or beans or whatever we had that day. By the time I got through with them, I usually got their food.

It wasn’t until the fifth grade that I truly got bitten by the show business bug. Mrs. Juanita Mackey was my teacher, and was also the 4-H Club director for grade school. In 4-H Club we did skits, practiced public speaking, showed calves and pigs, canned food, made aprons and pot holders—the works. Then, for the annual 4-H Share-the-Fun talent show, Mrs. Mackey let me borrow her daughter’s prom dress and shoes, along with a rhinestone necklace and bracelet, to sing “My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown.” I felt like Cinderella. I won first in the Junior Individual Act division. It was my first trophy.

That victory made me like a hunting dog—I had tasted blood and now knew deep within my very soul that I was to be an entertainer.

Besides that, I recognized that singing was the best way to get any attention. I wasn’t the oldest child in the family or the youngest, or even the only boy. I was the third child, so the only other way I could get noticed was to make trouble—but that was definitely not the kind of attention I was looking for.

M
Y ENERGY AND AGGRESSION FOUND ANOTHER HEALTHY OUTLET
in fifth grade—athletics. I ran track that year and still hold the record for the seventy-five-yard dash in the Pittsburg County Conference, according to Paul Davis, my first coach.