Reba: My Story (10 page)

We didn’t have a bass player, but Roger Wills wanted
to try it. He already knew the frets of the guitar, so Clark Rhyne set out to teach him. Today, Roger is one of the top bass players in Nashville, thanks to that high school band. He was with me for five years and now plays and is the band leader for Alan Jackson.

Kelly Rhyne was not only our drummer, but most importantly he was my second serious boyfriend (my first was Doug Hull). Kelly and I wrote love notes back and forth to each other and he introduced me to Three Dog Night and Chicago—rock ’n’ roll bands with great harmony. He was also a wonderful kisser! When he wasn’t playing with us he was playing bigger jobs that paid him more. He was that good. When he was gone, Carol Johnston and I took turns playing drums and rhythm guitar. When she sang and played the guitar, I played the drums, and vice versa. But I could just barely keep the beat. I’d certainly never hire a drummer who played as badly as I did!

Our band’s repertoire really had a range to it. Of the eight band members—Kelly, Roger, David, and Gary were into rock ’n’ roll; Pake, Carol, Diannia, and I wanted to do country. So we compromised: “The song list ran all the way from Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn to Merle Haggard, which is about as country as you can get, but probably about as deep as we got was ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,’ ” Clark remembers. “We were real strong on Glen Campbell—‘Galveston,’ ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ and ‘Wichita Lineman.’ I would go buy the songbook and the kids would learn the chords right off.”

Once we got going, the band entertained during lunch breaks, until the noise got to Mr. Toaz and he put his foot down and made us stop, and at all the major high school functions. For example, the senior class would get us to put on a benefit to help them raise money for their year-end trip. We also played all of the school’s home football games, performing before the kickoff and at halftime.

“And the band was so much better than the football
team,” Clark Rhyne said, “that at halftime if they didn’t quit playing everybody would be down here watching the band and nobody was watching the football game. We’d just have to make them quit playing, because the crowd—there would be three hundred people gathered up around where the band was picking—the crowd would be requesting songs and saying, ‘Well, don’t quit yet.’ And the football game was going on and we’d just have to pull the plug.”

We had tremendous success for a group of high school kids. We won virtually every contest we entered, including both the county and district 4-H Club Share-the-Fun Contests. For one of these, we worked up a patriotic medley including “Okie from Muskogee” and wore red, white, and blue outfits. Where we came from, you couldn’t get more patriotic than that. We were Okies too! We even wound up singing at the 4-H State Convention at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

T
HE KIOWA HIGH SCHOOL COWBOY BAND GREW SO POPULAR
that it landed some real, paying jobs in honky-tonks and dance halls. We couldn’t have gotten away with that in Tulsa or Oklahoma City, because all of us were minors, too young to legally be inside those places, but in the small towns it was different. Mama and Carol Johnston’s parents would take two carloads of teenage musicians over to the high school, where we would pick up the musical equipment. After the job, the equipment was returned to the school before our parents drove us to our various homes.

Usually, we were asleep by the time we got out of the parking lot of the club. We were a bunch of kids barely in puberty who didn’t get to bed until almost daylight after some of our shows. Once, we played a club in Ardmore, Oklahoma, from 9
P.M.
until 1
A.M.
, passed the hat, then played two more sets from 1
A.M.
until 3
A.M.
We made thirteen dollars apiece.

The club audiences could be rough, but they gave us
good training in how to work a crowd. Some of those dances turned into fistfights set to music. More often than not, it was so dark in those clubs that we couldn’t even see them fighting. We just thought they were all dancing, and we’d play right through it. When the truth was too obvious to ignore, Clark would tell us, “If a fight breaks out to the left, you go to the right. Don’t stand there on the stage and watch it. Take everyone’s attention to the other direction.”

And so we did.

Pake remembered a show where Mama told us on the way home that she thought the crowd really enjoyed our music.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I counted fourteen fights,” she said.

We were playing in clubs at the time I was baptized at the Kiowa Baptist church, and getting really serious about the right and wrong things in life. I was twelve. One Saturday night when we played the W-H Corral in Sulphur, I told Mama that when I got onstage I planned to ask the audience if they were going to go to church the next morning.

She just looked at me and smiled.

“Reba,” she said, “what makes you think those people don’t go to church every Sunday?”

I was stunned. I had never thought of that.

“Do you think they do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but before I got up and started preaching to them and telling them how bad they are, I’d sure find out.”

That was my first lesson about not judging people. How did I know what they did when they left the honky-tonk? And anyway, it wasn’t any of my business.

I
NDIRECTLY, THE KIOWA HIGH SCHOOL COWBOY BAND BROUGHT
me one of the first great highs of my career. The Harmon Jones Ford dealership in Atoka held a contest to choose
“Miss Ford Country,” hiring our band to play for entertainment during the day. And I won the contest!

My winning had less to do with my singing than with my writing, but that’s not what the band thought. They said I won because I was a McEntire, accusing the judges of favoritism toward my family. I lived with that one for a long time.

The contest was actually an essay contest. Contestants were supposed to write why they thought they should win the use of a new Ford for six months. I wrote that because I was a singer and rodeo contestant, I’d drive the car all over the country. The car would carry the name of Harmon Jones Ford and be good advertising.

The judges were convinced, and at sixteen years old, there I was tooling around on my own, showing off my prize. I put 18,000 miles on that car in six months.

Mama, Daddy, Susie, my friend Kathy Mitchell, and I all piled in the car and took it to Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the annual Frontier Days Rodeo. As soon as we returned, I went with Debbie Boyd, Clark and Sue Rhyne, and their son, Jim Buie, who was two, to Colorado. I had a great time with that car.

I
MAY HAVE BEEN OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE A CAR OF MY OWN AND
to perform in nightclubs, but of course, I was still a kid. As serious as us McEntires were about our music, none of us lost our sense of mischief once we got to high school. Pake still likes to tell the story about how one of Alice’s boyfriends, Jerry Wilson, talked me into trying chewing tobacco. I turned green and threw up, and Pake died laughing.

He also reminds me of the time he and I went to a calf roping and jackpot barrel race. In a jackpot barrel race, ten or so girls who want to run barrels put up money. The winner of the race gets most of the money, depending upon the split that was agreed on. I was always nervous while
running barrels, and this time I got especially shaky when the announcer introduced me as Dorothy instead of Reba.

So what did Pake do? He leaned over the rail, and as I rounded the last barrel, he began hollering, “Come on, Dorothy! Come on, Dorothy!”

A little thing like that can be real distracting.

I don’t know why Pake does such things, and he can’t understand why the women in the family get mad at him!

Of course, there were times I got back at Pake, but nearly always, Pake got the last laugh.

Once, Pake, Alice, and I went to a steer roping in Tucumcari, New Mexico, when Alice’s boy, Vince, was only two. Pake was a grown man who was supposed to be in charge of the group. Well, that grown man took a piece of a radiator hose off the pickup’s dash and put Vince’s arm in all the way up to his armpit.

Then it wouldn’t come off.

Vince was crying, Alice was cussing, and Pake, who was driving, wasn’t paying the right amount of attention to the road. And if Vince wasn’t upset enough, he became especially loud when his uncle Pake took out a pocketknife to cut the radiator hose off his arm. He probably thought Pake was going to amputate!

Once the radiator hose was removed and Vince’s blood pressure was back down, we decided we should stop to eat. Afterward, Alice and Vince climbed into the camper, where she was going to try to get him to go to sleep. I had to go to the bathroom, so I was the last to come out of the café, and Alice had told Pake to be sure to wait for me.

But Pake pretended he thought I was in the camper with Alice and Vince. He knew exactly what he was doing as he began to drive away, leaving me standing in a deserted New Mexico truck stop parking lot.

I began to chase the pickup, yelling, “Pake, stop! Stop!”

The closer I got to the pickup, the more Pake gradually
accelerated. I was running as fast as I could while he acted like he didn’t notice me.

I couldn’t tell he had me in the corner of his eye.

I finally got close enough to pound on the driver’s window. Then Pake finally looked around.

“Oh, Reba!” Pake said, pretending to be surprised. “I thought you were in the back of the truck.”

I won’t tell you what I said to him.

P
AKE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL THREE YEARS AFTER THE BAND
was formed, and shortly thereafter, the Kiowa High School Cowboy Band disbanded. It has never reassembled. Clark went on to become principal of Kiowa High School, and a few months before his retirement in 1993, he explained why he never put together another group.

“Our average class size runs twenty-five kids,” he said. “So we’re talking 150 kids in school. And how many times, in a school that small, do you find someone who becomes Alan Jackson’s bass player? How many times do you find Pake, who had his own band and traveled and got songs in the Top Ten? His first song on RCA went to number five. And Reba’s super stardom? Plus the Raiburn boy, who plays professionally around Dallas. My brother, Kelly, is playing part-time, and has traveled hitches with Reba on the road. Now how many times are you going to find that much talent in a school that small? It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”