On the night of September 17, 1977, Reba McEntire was supposed to sing two songs on the Grand Ole Opry. Her parents, Clark and Jacqueline McEntire, and her older sister Alice had made the drive from Oklahoma to Nashville to be there, a trip the Opry itself counts as a 1,400-mile round trip. By the end of the night she had sung one song, for roughly three minutes, and she had very nearly not been allowed through the gate at all.
A Career That Started at No. 88
Reba was 22 and still a long way from being a household name. She had signed with Mercury Records after Red Steagall heard her sing, and in January 1976 she recorded her first single, “I Don’t Want to Be a One Night Stand.” It climbed only as high as No. 88 on the country chart. Her self-titled debut album came out in August 1977, less than a month before the Opry date, and it did not chart either.
Decades later, she was blunt about that start. Speaking to Billboard in 2019, she said that if her career had begun that way in the modern era, she would have been “home washing dishes, singing in the shower.”
“Not Tonight”
When the McEntires pulled up to the artists’ entrance, a guard with a clipboard stopped the car. Reba retold the moment on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2022: her daddy rolled down the window and announced that Reba McEntire was performing on the show that night, and the guard looked at his list and said, “Not tonight.” In her memoir, Reba: My Story, she wrote that he told them to turn around and go home.
They turned around, but they did not go home. Reba called a veteran booking agent, who told her to go back to the gate. When they did, she wrote, the guard’s attitude had “totally changed.” She later called it one of her first lessons in the power of influence. In the same memoir she recalled her father telling her that night that he had been named all-around cowboy at a rodeo exactly thirty years earlier, and she took it as a lucky sign.
Two Songs Became One
Once inside, Reba changed into her outfit, a straight denim skirt with a matching shirt, according to her memoir. Then the Opry staff told her they would have to take one of her songs. Dolly Parton had shown up unannounced, and the time had to come from somewhere.
Reba had planned to sing Roger Miller’s “Invitation to the Blues” and Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams.” Only “Invitation to the Blues” made it. She wrote that she was never resentful toward Dolly, only that she wished someone had simply told her to come back another night, and that following Dolly Parton would not have been easy even for a veteran. She also admitted she was so nervous she hardly remembered getting through the song. Her family had come roughly 700 miles each way, and the whole debut was over in about the length of one record.
From “Invitation to the Blues” to “Can’t Even Get the Blues”
The breakthrough took a few more years. On November 11, 1981, Reba McEntire recorded “Can’t Even Get the Blues” at Woodland Sound Studio in Nashville. It was an up-tempo song written by Tom Damphier and Rick Carnes, and according to American Songwriter, she had to argue with producer Jerry Kennedy before he agreed to let her cut it. Released as a single in the fall of 1982, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart in January 1983. It was her fourteenth single to reach the country chart and the first to go all the way to the top.
Nine Years Later, a Member
In January 1986, during a televised celebration of the Opry’s 60th anniversary, Reba McEntire was made a member of the Grand Ole Opry, the same stage where a guard once told her she was not on the list. That fall, the Country Music Association named her Entertainer of the Year.
Clark McEntire lived until 2014, and Jacqueline McEntire until 2020. The people who drove all those miles for one three-minute song lived long enough to watch their daughter become one of the most decorated women in the history of country music.
Reba has never talked about the Opry as just a venue. “The Grand Ole Opry is a home,” she has said. “It’s a family.”