E-mail a friendReba McEntire
airdate August 25, 2009
Reba McEntire is one of the most successful country singers in the industry. She's racked up more than 55 million in album sales, 33 No. 1 hits, 2 Grammys and numerous other awards. She's also had success in TV, with a self-titled top-rated series, on Broadway, earning rave reviews for her performance in Annie Get Your Gun, in film, as an author, with a best-selling autobiography, and as an entrepreneur. The Oklahoma native's 31st album—and first solo project in six years—"Keep on Loving You," was recently released by her new label.
Country queen comments on writing a song about turning 50 and shares how she celebrated her 50th birthday. (1:42)
Full interview. (11:17)
Reba McEntire
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Reba McEntire to this program. Earlier this year she was recognized by "Billboard" for having the most top 10 hits by a female artist in the history of the country music charts. (Laughs) Her much-talked-about new CD is called "Keep On Loving You." Here now, some of the video for the single, "Strange."
[Clip]
Tavis: He broke my heart, I cried myself to sleep trying to get over him. There really are only like three subject matters for country-western music, aren't there?
Reba McEntire: Well, there's maybe four.
Tavis: Maybe four? (Laughter) Maybe four, you think?
McEntire: Yeah.
Tavis: He broke my heart; she broke my heart - what else we got here?
McEntire: Well, then they break up.
Tavis: Then they break up.
McEntire: Yeah, and then they make up, and then everything's happy again. (Laughter)
Tavis: That's why I love country music, it's simple stuff. I'm glad to have you on.
McEntire: Well, thank you very much, good to be on your show.
Tavis: My pleasure. This is what, number 33?
McEntire: Yeah, it's the 33rd album.
Tavis: Well, you're good at it, obviously. You still love doing this?
McEntire: Oh, I really do. I love recording, I love performing live. I've gotten to do other things, I'm very blessed by that, but I love to get back with music.
Tavis: What's your process like? Everybody has a different process for writing and recording. Tell me about your process.
McEntire: Well, I don't write a lot of my things. I do have one song, although, that I wrote, but usually about 10 months before we go in to record I let the songwriters and the publishers know when I'm going to be recording and here comes all the demo tapes and the CDs, and I start listening.
People at my record label start listening, Valerie Music Company and Starstruck, and we just try to find as many great songs as we possibly can. At one time I had 200 songs on hold and I had to start eliminating, because a lot of other people are looking at the same time and it's not right for me to hang on to all those.
So I got it down to about 20, 15 by the time we went into the studio last January and I used two producers, Mark Bright and Tony Brown, and we went in with the musicians there into the studio at Starstruck and we laid down the tracks and I just kept singing.
Tavis: I want to ask you two follow-ups about your process, given what you've said now, Reba. One, again, every artist has a different way of doing this. Where does the ease for you come from for recording other people's music? Some people insist on recording their own stuff, and if they don't do all of their own stuff there's a greater balance of their stuff and other people's stuff.
But you said very clearly you record mostly other people's stuff. Why is that the case for you?
McEntire: I don't care who writes it or who publishes it, I want the best song. That's what I'm looking for. And I will listen to a song and if I like it and I think this may be one, I'll ask Narvel, my husband and manager, I'll say, "Listen to this." And he'll say, "Who wrote it?" I'll say, "I have no idea." Because I don't look at that, I don't want to be swayed.
Because I do have my favorite songwriters, but I try not to look at it because I want the best song.
Tavis: And the best song for you is what? What's a best song? What's a good song for Reba McEntire?
McEntire: A good song for me is one that touches my heart, gives me chills. Because if I can be touched by this song, and when I sing it hopefully you'll be touched by it, too.
Tavis: The one song here that you wrote - tell me about the track you referenced a moment ago.
McEntire: It's called "She's Turning 50 Today," and I wrote it when I turned 50. I started it out - I didn't write the whole thing. And that's about as far as I could get on the first two lines. (Laughter) Yeah.
Tavis: And the first two lines are what?
McEntire: Her husband left on Saturday for a woman that was half her age. And I thought, well, wow, that's pretty bad. (Laughter) And so I sent it to Liz Hengber -
Tavis: I think that falls into the third category of the country-western song.
McEntire: (Laughs) Oh, yeah, you're exactly right. I knew there was a fourth one, that was it. And so I sent it to Liz Hengber, who has written lots of songs for me, and I said, "Hey, see if you can do anything with this idea." And so she got with Tommy Lee James, who's another great songwriter, and they started writing and they MP3ed it back to me and said, "What do you think?" And so we made a few changes on the second verse and I went in and recorded it.
Tavis: What did, if anything, turning 50 do for you career-wise, personally and professionally, since you referenced it?
McEntire: Personally, it was like wow, I've hit that mark where I feel very blessed that I've made it this far, and I celebrated.
Tavis: But you weren't scared at all?
McEntire: No, no, I had three parties. Narvel gave me three birthday parties, one in L.A., one in Atoka, Oklahoma, and one in Nashville. And I celebrated for my friends and my family members who didn't - would never make it to 50.
Tavis: Is a party for a country-western star different in Oklahoma or Tennessee than it is in L.A.?
McEntire: Yes.
Tavis: How do you party in L.A. when you're a country-western star?
McEntire: You get The Little River Band to come in and play for you.
Tavis: Okay. (Laughter)
McEntire: That's a party.
Tavis: Yeah, I got it, so you bring the country-western to L.A. and it's still a party.
McEntire: We had a blast.
Tavis: Yeah. I was saying to you before we came on the air here that to my - I love a lot of good country music and to my ear, to those four categories we spoke of earlier, when you hear a country-western artist typically sing about whatever it is you don't get the impression that they grew up on an 8,000-acre ranch. It's like everybody grew up on a dirt road, nobody had nothing; everybody had an outhouse.
You don't get this 8,000-acre image and that's the ranch you grew up on. So I don't think your upbringing, you tell me, was typical of most country-western stars, what we think of, at least, when we think country-western. Does that make sense?
McEntire: Yes, it does. I don't think it was typical. I did grow up on a working cattle ranch in southeastern Oklahoma. Mama and Daddy and Alice (unintelligible) and myself, Susie, four kids, we were the hired hands on the ranch and we got paid room and board. (Laughter) But we had a great time. Daddy was also a rodeo cowboy, and so he -
Tavis: An award-winning rodeo cowboy.
McEntire: Yeah, he won the world championship three years, '57, '58, and '61. So we'd either go off rodeoing and then come back and work the ranch and had a great time. Consequently, three of us kids rodeoed. Alice was the runner-up in '71 to the IRA championship in barrel racing, (unintelligible) rodeoed, and then I rodeoed for about 10 years.
Tavis: Ten years. Were you good at this?
McEntire: No.
Tavis: (Laughter) So why 10 years, then?
McEntire: Well, it was fun.
Tavis: Yeah?
McEntire: Oh, yeah. You travel all over the country and hang out with your buddies. And Daddy kept saying, "Reba, why do you want to do something that you're not good at?" And I'm like, "Wait a minute - was that a back-handed compliment or what?" (Laughter) But he was meaning get back out there and sing.
And so that's - rodeo and singing came together in 1974 when I sang the National Anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City, and a friend that I'd met during the rodeo, Red Steagall, took me to Nashville and 11 months later I had a Polygram-Mercury recording contract.
Tavis: Wow. For those who have never done - I've been to a couple of rodeos; I've never, obviously, done it. It's the same for people who've never been to a NASCAR race. As one who has done it, what's the thrill of being a rodeo? What's the thrill?
McEntire: Well, it's kind of dangerous and it's exciting. My event was a timed event, so it was very exciting. You're running full-blast on a horse and stopping and making three turns and coming back and stopping in a dark alleyway behind the arena. So it's scary, it's exciting, it's exhilarating, and as I said I didn't win much so I didn't make any money off of it, so thank God I could sing.
Tavis: When did you know - you mentioned your big break a moment ago, but I assume prior to the big break you knew, especially with your daddy encouraging you to go back and sing because you weren't so good at the rodeo, when did you know that you were especially gifted in that way?
McEntire: I think the way I knew I had a little something special there was because when - see, I was the third child out of four kids. I wasn't the oldest, I wasn't the youngest, I wasn't the only boy, I was the third kid. So you were always doing a lot of stupid things to try to get attention - good attention, not bad. But the singing was the way I got the attention, so I knew it must be something a little special.
Tavis: Let me fast-forward and I'll come back - what do you make, then, these 33 albums later, of being the biggest female country-western star of all time?
McEntire: I kind of like it. (Laughter) Who wouldn't? Good Lord. We've been in this business a long, long time and we've had our ups and downs, but man, we've really worked real hard and traveled all over the world. What a great job. I absolutely love it.
Tavis: Are your parents still living?
McEntire: Mm-hmm.
Tavis: What does your father now make of the success of his third child?
McEntire: He loves it. He doesn't tell us kids much when he's proud of us. He just says, "Y'all did pretty good," and that kind of thing. (Laughter) He's pretty low-key. But Mama was always the one that was our cheerleader. She didn't want us to be the best, she never told us, "You have to be the best." She said, "I just want you to do your best."
Tavis: I hear that distinction, and that's a critical distinction.
McEntire: Yeah, yeah.
Tavis: You ain't got to be the best, but do your best.
McEntire: Just do your best.
Tavis: I like that. You've been fortunate, we all know, in that you've been able to move from beyond the success of country music. If you hadn't done anything else, you'd be okay. But with Broadway and television, you've had a pretty wide range - your palette's been pretty interesting over the years.
McEntire: Been a lot of fun, too. When we got started with "Annie, Get Your Gun" on Broadway they had asked me several times before to do it and I said, "No, no, I can't." I like to travel; I don't want to be staying in one place for a year. (Laughter) And so when they asked me to do it several times, Narvel said, "Well, we can't."
So we were going over to Europe to do a television show and we had flown from Nashville up to New York to get on the Concorde and fly over the London, and they canceled our flight. And so Narvel said, "Well, we got a day off here in New York, what do you want to do?" I said, "Well, let's go see a play."
He said, "What do you want to see?" And I said, "I don't care." And he said, "Well, let's go see 'Annie, Get Your Gun.' Let's see what they're talking about." And by intermission we sat there and I said, "I've got to be on that stage." And so we cleared our next six months for the following year. That was in 2000, so 2001 we started in January, and it was one of the most fulfilling, wonderful experiences I'd ever gotten to experience.
Tavis: And you got rave reviews for that, too.
McEntire: I was a little drawn up in a knot about that because I thought Bernadette Peters, how do you beat that?
Tavis: Sure. That's who you replaced, exactly.
McEntire: So we went and did it, but the way I talk, the way I act, and I am a country girl, so it was just - it fit like a glove.
Tavis: I don't want to put words in your mouth - in my faith tradition we would call that divine intervention that the flight got canceled, and you go to -
McEntire: That happens all the time.
Tavis: I was about to ask you, does that happen for you in your life a lot?
McEntire: Yes, yes. People will say, "What are you going to do next?" I say, "Don't know, I haven't been told yet." "Well, who tells you?" "Oh, I just wait. I listen." Yeah, that divine intervention happens a lot with us.
Tavis: Well, thank God for divine intervention.
McEntire: Amen.
Tavis: It's worked for 33 records. (Laughter) And I suspect it'll keep on working. Her name, you well know - Reba McEntire. It's her 33rd album. It's called "Keep On Loving You," available everywhere. Reba, nice to have you on. All the best to you.
McEntire: Thanks, thanks.
Tavis: Thanks for coming on.
McEntire: My pleasure.
Back to August 25, 2009