Ex-rodeo cowgirl Reba McEntire, country music`s reigning female queen and maybe its most powerful vocalist, says people have begun to ask her if, at her present age of 33, she will soon retire.
No chance.
”When it takes you a long time to get somewhere–like walking up steps real slow, getting to the top of the Empire State Building by walking up the stairs–you have a lot of time to think and plan what you want to do when you get there,” McEntire says.
”Once you get there, you think, `Let`s stay up here and see what we can do.` ”
One thing the red-haired Oklahoma native (scheduled to perform at 7 and 10:30 p.m. next Saturday at Holiday Star Theatre in Merrillville, Ind., and Aug. 24 at Poplar Creek Music Theatre in Hoffman Estates) hasn`t been doing is playing it safe.
For example, she recently has done several varied things she hadn`t done before:
— Planning her first publicity tour of London and possibly other trans-Atlantic cities this fall to lay groundwork for 1988, meanwhile also tackling a few major stateside cities she has yet to conquer.
— Recording songs about such topical subjects as wife-abuse and world hunger on her next LP, ”The Last One To Know,” to be released in September. — Pondering why, after more than a decade of recording, she suddenly has had her career`s first three gold albums–”Whoever`s In New England,” ”What Am I Gonna Do About You” and ”Greatest Hits”–within the last year and a half.
— Shopping for a new home in Nashville after a recent divorce that she says has bothered some of her fans.
”I didn`t know where else to go,” she says of the Nashville move. ”I spend so much time here, I thought, `Why not make it a base?`
”But the thing I`d like most to do is travel. There`s lots of things I want to see and go do. When we travel on business, we just see the hotel, the airport, the highway or the hall; we don`t get to sightsee. So although I`ve been a lot of places, I`ve missed a lot.”
She says she has resisted suggestions to go overseas until now because she has ”always said I don`t need to leave the United States until I get it more covered.
”Then MCA (for which she makes records) said, `Well, we don`t need to be releasing albums over there until you go over,` ” she says.
”So I thought about it some more, and then we got so much more done over here. In August I`m totally booked, not just shows but things like going to see (record-buying) accounts and setting up receptions in places where we haven`t worked, so I can go in there and work. Kind of like the London thing, except I`m doing the same thing here in the United States.”
Where, one wonders, has she yet to perform in the U.S.?
”San Francisco,” she replies. ”And I haven`t worked much in Denver.
”We`ve been a little bit too safe, so now we`re going to kind of dive off into deep water and see. We may not draw the crowds we`re used to, but in new territories you`ve got to kind of start over. It`s not as exciting when you just stay in areas you`re used to. I want to know (in the untried ones) if I`m gonna bomb or make it.”
Her greatest success followed a 1985 move into comparatively virgin territory: New England, an area many country stars have shunned, wrongly assuming it isn`t ”country.”
McEntire, by contrast, not only recorded a song focusing on the area, she even filmed a music video of the song in Boston`s Logan Airport. That video, her first, won several awards, and the song, the title tune of her first gold- selling album, became her career`s biggest so far.
”The song could have been what started the gold album sales,” she reflects, ”because it was about a part of the country that nobody had really centered on.
”It really made a difference. I get a lot more mail from that part of the country now, and more members joining our fan club. Our sales are great up there, and our market`s good; we`re touring up there a lot this year. We`re going to play Vermont, for instance, which I`ve never played before, and Rhode Island.”
The genius of the song is that it focuses on New England without ignoring the rest of the country; it concerns a woman in an unnamed, other section of the nation whose husband is making so many New England ”business trips” that she worries whether romance is involved.
”People everywhere liked the song,” McEntire notes.
Her new LP promises to have other memorable tunes. She mentions a ”real cute” one called ”I Don`t Want To Mention Any Names,” about a woman gracefully chiding a female friend about messing with her man; a ”positive love song” titled ”Someone Else”; and one that ”touched my heart” titled ”Just Across the Rio Grande.”
”It`s about this man standing across the border in Mexico,” she says.
”One of the lines that really got me was when he says he had heard they eat three meals a day just across the Rio Grande.”
But the album`s most topical song, no doubt, will be ”The Stairs,” a wife-abuse song about a woman who tries to hide the shame of her beatings behind lies about falling down the stairs.
McEntire says she and MCA Records` Nashville boss Jimmy Bowen had a meeting in which she told him she had ”two songs–one`s about wife-abuse, and one`s about child-abuse–and I want one of `em in there.
”He said, `Well, you got guts,` ” she recalls with a laugh. ”I said,
`Yeah, I`m here to prove a point.` I get that way sometimes.”
Then she sobers.
”I just think it needed to be said. It`s a problem in today`s society, and it needs to be known. I sort of felt that if a person is abused, they would feel it`s not a nice thing to be talking about, and I thought if I sang about it, they might think, `Well, Reba sang about it, so maybe I can talk to somebody about it.”`
”That (wife-beating) is something I would never put up with, and I was hoping I might give some other woman the strength to say, `Well, I`m not going to put up with it, either.` Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of people out there in that situation, and it was kind of my love and my support going out through that song to them. That might sound real corny, but it`s the truth.”
She says the recent dissolution of her own, long-term marriage doesn`t seem to have ”affected my career any,” although it has prompted ”lots of reaction” from fans.
She recalls a two-show date a few days earlier in Columbia, Mo., where
–while cleaning up the stateroom of her bus between shows–she ran across a box of song tapes that also included some fan letters. She says she picked up one marked ”D,” meaning it contained comments having to do with her divorce. She opened it.
The fan, a woman, said she was ”so angry, so mad” over the news, because she thought McEntire always had revered the institution of marriage;
she had read every article she could find about McEntire, and McEntire`s long- standing example had helped save her own marriage in flagging moments.
”She said, `I know I don`t have any right to know, but I want to know why,` ” McEntire continues.
”Some of the fans are mad because they`ve idolized me, and if this divorce hasn`t done anything else, I`m glad it opened their eyes. Because I`m not the one they need to be idolizing. They need to be looking up a lot higher, and if this divorce made them realize I`m a person instead of something to worship and idolize, then I`m for it.
”Everybody needs hope, something to get their strength from. God`s who I look to, and that`s what I want them to do: Get their eyes off me, and get them on God. I hope this divorce has just made them stronger and more able to depend on themselves and the good Lord above, instead of me.”
But she won`t be replying to the letter of the woman who asked why.
”If her marriage was supposed to be, that`s fine,” McEntire says. ”The way I feel about it, I share my music and I share a lot of my life, probably more than I should.
”But what I do about my marriage is nobody`s business but mine and God`s.”
