In 1974, a young Oklahoma barrel-racer named Reba McEntire was discovered when she sang the national anthem at the National Rodeo in Oklahoma City.
She has come a long way since. With 50 million records sold, film and television appearances, a successful stint on Broadway and the first season of her own TV series now under her belt, the red-haired country singer has flown far beyond her original genre and become a bona fide pop crossover phenomenon.
There’s little need to add the “McEntire” surname anymore. Reba, 48, is now a one-name pop superstar.
And she has a one-name hit sitcom to prove it. “Reba,” which debuted in the fall of 2001 on the WB network, wraps up its current season Friday night (8 p.m., WGN-Ch. 9) with two episodes. The WB’s top comedy season-to-date and the leading Friday night comedy in its time slot, “Reba” averages 4.2 million viewers a week.
The sitcom casts Reba as a divorced single mom juggling kids, a pregnant teen daughter, and a remarried ex-husband. In the midst of this dysfunctional family, Reba never sands down her salty twang or earthy sensibility.
Appeals to women
It’s not a show that courts a hipster demographic. Her character’s appeal is aimed directly at the heart of her greatest constituency — middle-American women in a Wal-Mart world, struggling to keep their sanity intact in the midst of family crises.
“It’s the same thing I was doing with my songs,” she says about her sitcom. “It’s relatable subject matter. People can [watch it] and say, `Oh, my gosh, she’s telling my life story,’ or, `I’ve been there before.’ And also add a little humor with maybe a rough situation. We intentionally went there.”
Considering the entire arc of her career, Reba in some ways has torn a page from the Dolly Parton and Barbara Mandrell handbook, two earlier country show queens who emphasized glitz and showmanship and made forays into the pop consciousness.
Parton, a trenchant songwriter and singer, has starred in films and television and has become a household name on a par with Oprah. Mandrell, a steel guitar child prodigy and multi-instrumentalist, took her pop-country to the masses with her hit 1980-82 NBC variety series “Barbara Mandrell & the Mandrell Sisters.”
Props for her `sisters’
Reba is the first to give props to this earlier generation of country women.
“They’ve always been huge influences in my career, my life,” she says. “Hardworking women, bound and determined, had their minds set on what they wanted, went after it and achieved that goal.”
In many ways, Reba has gone further in the popular marketplace than either Parton or Mandrell. Last year, she made national headlines for her Broadway turn in the classic Irving Berlin musical “Annie Get Your Gun.” Reba’s stint on the Great White Way was both a commercial and critical hit.
“She totally took New York by storm,” says Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn Theaters in New York and the lead producer of the current smash musical “The Producers.”
Landesman points out that Reba had her work cut out for her when she first accepted the role. “I think New York was very resistant to her, to people coming in from the outside thinking they could take over a role from a New Yorker,” he says. “And she just blew everybody away. She was fabulous.”
“In a sense, she is doing what Dolly has done, but she went a step further,” says her longtime music producer, Tony Brown. “The Broadway experience, that could have been just OK, but she ended up being the toast of the town. The reviews were saying she was the best since Ethel Merman, saying in the same sentence she was the next Lucille Ball.”
Criticized for crossover
On the music front, Reba, like Parton and Mandrell before her, has at times found herself under critical fire for listing to the pop side in her music at the expense of her country roots. It wasn’t always so. When she first came on the recording scene more than two decades ago, Reba was considered one of country’s “new traditionalists” along with George Strait and Ricky Skaggs.
Today, Reba doesn’t waste energy worrying about genre distinctions. It’s the song that counts, not the style. At her best, she has excelled at modernized country-politan epics, such as her solid covers of Bobbie Gentry’s teen prostitute anthem “Fancy” and the murder-betrayal tale “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.”
For a mainstream queen, she has also taken some chances. Her current greatest hits CD release, “I’m a Survivor,” includes her 1994 hit “She Thinks His Name Was John,” a story-song about a woman who contracts AIDS after unprotected sex with a one-night stand. In concert, Reba performed the number against a backdrop of the AIDS quilt, sending a message to mainstream America that the disease did not discriminate.
It was a bold move in a Nashville recording industry not known for its social courage.
“I thought if I could sing about it, people could talk about it,” she says now. “Then all the bad, scary things about AIDS could be talked about. When you bring it out into the light, it’s not as scary. In fact, ignorance is scary. Not knowin’ the facts is scary. But if you know more about it, and then you do meet someone who has AIDS, you can go up and hug their neck. And you can give some compassion, instead of judge and be afraid. And that’s what I wanted to portray in that song.”
