Reba: My Story (9 page)

I also started playing basketball, which indirectly helped to boost my musical skills. After hearing me sing, the coach of a summer basketball camp in Wahoo, Nebraska, invited me to come for three weeks. Mama only had to pay for the first week of my basketball training, and for
the next two weeks I was to be a counselor and entertainer for the girls.

The catch was that I’d need to learn to play the guitar. Thanks to a crash course from Pake, by the time I got there I knew enough songs to get by, most of them from Dolly Parton’s
Blue Ridge Mountain Boy
album. I must not have played too well—I still don’t play the guitar much—but that summer, no one complained. The next few summers I went to Lindsay, Oklahoma, to Charles Heatly’s Basketball Camp.

Back then we played half-court basketball—three on three—and I was a guard. I never had a lot of confidence in my ball playing, but apparently my coaches did. I was on the main team every year from then on, except when I was a sophomore in high school, and in my senior year, I even went on to the state finals.

Susie played basketball too, and her team made it to the district tournament. Pake recalled that the score was tied with only seconds left in the fourth quarter. Bill Hensley, the coach, called a time-out.

As the girls came in, Hensley struggled to be heard above the noise of the crowd, and it was hard to communicate with his exhausted players. He wanted the play to end with the passing of the ball to Susie.

She meant to ask him, “What do you want me to do, shoot?”

Instead, in her nervous excitement, she asked, “What do you want me to do, shit?”

Pake said the huddle fell out with laughter. He couldn’t remember if Susie’s team won or lost.

E
XCEPT FOR ONE MONTH IN 1962 WHEN MY DADDY TOOK US ALL
to Okeechobee, Florida, where he bought cattle, my twelve years of education were spent at Kiowa. There were about thirty kids in the first grade, and ten of us graduated together eleven years later: Sherry Stiles, Melia Echelle, Joni
Winslett, Roy Hatridge, Steve Phipps, Sue Fereday, Winford Hooe, Patty Ray, and Nathan Caldwell. My first cousin, Diannia Kay Smith, my uncle Dale’s daughter, started with us in the first grade but was held back in the sixth.

Diannia, Melia, Sherry, and I were pretty inseparable in our early years. One time, Diannia and I hid in one of Daddy’s trailers so she could spend the night with me. But when Uncle Dale and Aunt Virginia got halfway home, someone missed Diannia and they came back for her. We didn’t get into too much trouble for that.

You could usually find the whole gang of us at Sherry’s house on a Thursday night, when our favorite show, “Bewitched,” came on. We did fun, silly things together, like read Ouija boards and have séances. Those scared us all to death. We’d get Patty King from across the street because she was the lightest of the group. We’d lay her on the floor, and with two fingers apiece under her, we’d try to raise her off the ground. One time, we did lift her off the floor. We were so frightened when that happened, we dropped her!

Melia, Sherry, and I still keep in contact yearly, one way or another. Old friends remind you of the past and all the fun and silly things you did. Sorta keeps you humble too.

I also spent a lot of time with our other cousins, the Thompsons. With the ten-year-or-so age gap between us, they were our baby-sitters as well as our kinfolk. There were four of them—Doris Jean, Gary, Paula, and Rickie—the children of Aunt Jeannie, Mama’s sister, and her husband, Uncle Slim, whose real names were Imogene and Leslie Thompson. Doris was the oldest and the bossiest. She would put me behind the door whenever I’d get in trouble. Most of the time I’d fall asleep. She was also guilty of talking Alice into sticking her tongue to a frozen coffee can that was full of ice, and she was the one who put Pake on the calf that he fell off, breaking his right arm. I love
Doris Jean with all my heart. She’s a lot like Alice—I could call anytime I was in a tight spot and she’d be there to help.

Paula, also the second girl, was famous for her bedroom, where there were two twin beds. One she slept on, and the other stayed piled high with clothes, clean and dirty. We were a lot alike.

Rickie, the baby girl and a lot like Susie, used to keep big baskets of stuff in the top of her closet. Of course, I wanted to know what it was. I would shimmy up the sides of the closet, one foot on one side, one on the other, to find out—though finding out was never as much fun as getting there. I remember that, one time, Rickie was stuck taking care of me when she had a date with her boyfriend, Loyd. So we both got all dressed up—I was pretty excited, though not quite sure what a date was—but he never showed. Eventually they made up, and he is now her husband.

The only boy, Gary, was a very handsome young man and a good calf roper too. One night he and Alice were both up at the Bogata, Texas, rodeo, and I was honored that Gary asked me to hold his pocketknife, a cowboy’s most valuable possession, while he roped. He won first place.

The U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was picking up, and we were all afraid Gary was going to have to go. Instead, on September 16, 1968, I got called to the office at school.

Gary had been in the roping pen behind his home in Stringtown, trying to put a tarp over some hay with his friend Greg Cochran (who later became one of my bus drivers). They were fastening down the hay with baling wire, and the wire accidentally connected with a high-voltage electric line. Thousands of volts shot through Gary as he caught the baling wire. Mercifully, he was dead before he hit the ground.

I remember the wreath of daisies, shaped like a horse, that stood beside the casket. I was only a sixth-grader, when, for the first time, my life was touched by the death of someone I loved. We had all worried that Gary would be
sent to Vietnam, and then he was killed in his own backyard. I remember going to Aunt Jeannie and Uncle Slim’s house and thinking how hard it was going to be for them to go through his things. It was a long time before I ever spoke about Gary around them. The death of a loved one is something you never forget. And Gary was my first.

B
Y THE TIME I GOT TO JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, PAKE, SUSIE, AND I
were singing more and more together around our house. Sometimes we were the entertainment when Mama and Daddy’s friends came over to play dominoes. Alice didn’t join us much back then; she was mostly concentrating on her barrel-racing. But she really has a beautiful voice. She sings with us if it’s a family thing. She even sang at her oldest son’s wedding last year.

Pake played acoustic rhythm guitar and sang melody. I sang the high harmony, and Susie sang the low. Some of our favorite songs were “Silver Wings,” “Long Black Veil,” “Stars in My Crown,” and “Humble Shack.” But Pake loved Merle Haggard, especially. He would watch and wait for Merle Haggard to come out with a new album and when he did, Pake would listen, write down every word and then learn almost every song. And we’d look at every little bit of it—album liner and everything—until we knew everything about it, every lyric, every song. I’d do the same with a Loretta Lynn and a Dolly Parton album. Those two ladies made you feel like they were your best friends. I loved their songs—and still do.

People used to ask Daddy where us kids got our talent. He’d say, “Oh, they got that from their Mama.” That’s so, but we got our lungs from Daddy, and we exercised them early and often during those years up in the hills gathering cattle and becoming lost, when that famous McEntire yell saved our hides more than once. On 8,000 acres, you didn’t have a microphone with amplifiers. But it was Mama who taught us to sing harmony. I think that
bloodline harmony is a special harmony—the McGuire Sisters have it, the Gatlin Brothers have it. It’s the closest harmony in the world, I think.

M
AMA BECAME VERY EXCITED ABOUT HOW WE
’
D TAKEN TO
music, but she wished that we could get more formal musical training. At our school, there wasn’t a marching band or even much of a music curriculum. Fortunately, that changed when Clark Rhyne came to Kiowa High School. He had been a McEntire family friend for years. He admired Daddy’s and Grandpap’s rodeo skills, and Clark’s grandfather’s sister was the former Alice Buie, one of Pap McEntire’s wives. More importantly, Clark, in addition to being a teacher, is a professional musician, a fiddle and guitar player who played in honky-tonks around Oklahoma when I was a girl.

In fact, it was thanks to Clark Rhyne that I would make my first recording. It was of a song he wrote about Grandpap called “The Ballad of John McEntire.” The day after we heard it, Pake, Susie, and I went to Oklahoma City to record it. Clark had written it for experience and we recorded it for fun, but Clark did manage to sell a few around locally.

But that would come a couple of years later. Clark started teaching at Kiowa High School in 1969, when I was fourteen. At the time, Mama was working as the secretary to the superintendent of our school, the late Harold Toaz. So, with Clark’s cooperation, she pitched her boss on the notion of setting up a school country-music band. “She had a real knack of planting a seed of an idea in the old man,” Clark Rhyne later recalled. “And then he would think he thought of it. She planted a few seeds, and the old man called me in and asked me what I thought about it. I acted like it was the first I’d ever heard of it. And I said, ‘Oh, that’d just be great, wouldn’t that be great?’ And he said, ‘Well, we just might do it.’ ”

Mr. Toaz’s main concern was cost. There wasn’t a lot of extra money in the Kiowa High School budget, and he didn’t want to spend a fortune on instruments, microphones, and amplifiers. But Clark had an answer for that: He knew Smiley Weaver at Ada, who could get the band discounts on all the public address systems, and Bob Woods in Del City, who could give us great deals on instruments and amplifiers.

If it hadn’t been for those guys, there wouldn’t have been a Kiowa High School Cowboy Band, or maybe not even our family trio, the Singing McEntires. I’ll even say there might not have been a solo career for Reba McEntire. Thanks so much, Smiley and Bob, for helping us out!

We were able to equip five musicians and three singers with three electric guitars, an electric bass, drums, three microphones, and four amplifiers for about five hundred dollars. And I’ll never forget our speakers. Today I perform with about twenty speakers on each side of the stage. Each is about ten feet tall. The Kiowa High School Cowboy Band had two little bitty four-foot speakers, one on each side of the stage, for the entire band. The speakers were covered in electric blue padded patent leather with metallic flakes. We thought they were real cool!

Our early rehearsals were like music class, but held at the fairgrounds. Once our instruments and PA system came in, we moved over to the high school auditorium, which was also the cafeteria and which was where we’d have our concerts.

Our first order of business as a band was to decide who would play what. Kelly Rhyne could play drums, so he became our drummer, and David Jones was also a drummer. Pake knew how to play acoustic guitar, and Gary Raiburn became our electric guitar player. Carol Johnston, my cousin Diannia, and I all were there to sing, and my sister Susie would join us when she got to junior high school. Pake was the lead singer and also our band leader.