Reba McEntire never needed to be the best
LAS VEGAS: Her dressing room has rooms. Wings, even. It’s not so much a changing area as a backstage chateau. This is Reba McEntire’s sanctuary when she plays Caesars Palace in the town’s longest-running country music show. She’s the reigning Okie on the Strip.
“You don’t have to be the best,” she says. She swings her cowboy boots over an armchair; they’re from the REBA by Justin line, naturally. “You have to have that special something that connects with the audience.”
It took McEntire seven hard years of honky-tonks and dance halls to break through. So even as she emerged as one of country’s top-selling and most influential female artistes, McEntire resolved not to remain dependent on the mood swings of Nashville’s Music Row. Instead, she seized opportunity everywhere: movies, Broadway, a television series (two, actually), Carnegie Hall, a clothing line, a gig as the first female Colonel Sanders. She Reba-fied our world.
“There’s a lot of people, a lot of girl singers, who are 10,000 times better than me,” she says. “They don’t have the drive. They don’t have the work ethic. They don’t have the want-to, and they don’t love it as much as I do. And they’re not willing to sacrifice
You don’t have to be the best. You have to have that special something that connects with the audience.
what it takes to do this.”
The want-to. McEntire, 63, is only the third female country artiste (after Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton) and seventh artiste from the genre overall to receive the Kennedy Center Honors in the awards’ four decades. Was she surprised? Heck, no. “I’ve been wanting it for a long time.”
McEntire is dubbed the Queen of Country, though there isn’t anything regal about her. She would never cop an attitude, and her fans wouldn’t have it. The last name is superfluous. The hair, forever red, has whipped through so many permutations: big, bigger and Hello, Dolly! After four decades and 60 million albums sold, McEntire’s success remains rooted in her downhome, playful accessibility — and powered by innate business savvy and drive to succeed.
She has little talent for mystery. “An open book,” declares her son Shelby, a race car driver. Her manager agrees. As does her producer. Actually, pretty much everybody.
Unbidden, she shares that the longest break from touring occurred in 2002: “I had a hysterectomy, and I took the summer off.”
Discussing her first husband, steer wrestler Charlie Battles, “a piece of work” a decade her senior, whom she married at age 21, she divulges, “I think I married my daddy.”
On her 2015 divorce from Narvel Blackstock, her husband of 26 years (and also her manager): “Well, there’s not much you can do about it when you’re not the one that walks away. You get on your big girl panties, put your big boots on, and set an example for the children.” (The children — Shelby and her three stepkids — were all adults. She’s now in a relationship with Skeeter Lasuzzo, a photographer and retired geologist.) For a while, after the separation, McEntire managed herself.
“She’s the epitome of getting back on the horse,” says Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn, who share the Vegas stage with McEntire.
McEntire has prevailed by packing houses with what she calls her “tear-jerker, eat-yourheart-out songs,” delivered with her robust contralto and dexterous vibrato. “Reba is the bridge between Loretta Lynn and Shania Twain,” says critic Ann Powers.
“She loves the gusto of it all,” says Vince Gill. “She loves songs that are emotional, that tell stories. Like Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash — one note, and you know it’s her. That’s what separates an amazing artist from an OK one.” — WP-Bloomberg
Reba McEntire, country singer