What Did Reba McEntire Do Before Country Music Fame?
By Movieguide® Contributor
Before multi-time Grammy award winner Reba McEntire jumped into the world of country music, she had a spot on her family’s ranch as a cowgirl.
“I didn’t play cowgirl growing up,” McEntire told the Wall Street Journal. “I was one.”
“My family lived on an 8,000-acre ranch in Chockie, Oklahoma, where my father ran several thousand cattle a year,” she explained. “I began working on our ranch at age 5. If Daddy needed a driver to move grain in his pickup truck, he came in and got whoever was there.”
“I was so little that Daddy put a 50-pound feed sack on the driver’s seat before putting me on top of it,” McEntire recalled. “I’d be on my knees to work the steering wheel. He’d put the truck in granny gear, jump out and off I’d go.”
Fox News Digital reported, “McEntire was born in March 1955 to parents Clark and Jackie McEntire, who also shared daughters Alice and Susie as well as son Pake..her family lived in a small gray house on the ranch that had one bathroom.”
“With the girls — Alice, Susie, Mama and myself, we’d all be in there at the same time, and there never was a problem,” the singer said. “We loved each other’s company.”
McEntire and her siblings were very close growing up because there were no other nearby kids to play with.
“We just had each other,” the country star said.
McEntire’s father was a multi-time world champion steer roper.
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“Daddy was gone rodeoing between June and September,” McEntire recalled. “Running that big ranch while he was away fell to us kids. We also had a hired hand, Louie Sandman, and Grandpap, John McEntire, who was a champion steer roper himself.”
Because the ranch was so big, McEntire and her siblings would help out with the chores before school in the mornings.
“In my teens, in the fall, Pake and I would gather the horses in a 40-acre patch while Daddy fixed breakfast,” she said. “We’d get them saddled and head back to eat. After, we’d hop in the truck, load the horses into a trailer and take them to help steer the cattle into the area where they would be weighed and sold. Then we’d go to school with Mama. She was the school secretary.”
It was her mom who inspired McEntire to pursue music.
“She was our best friend, our cheerleader and our disciplinarian,” she said of her mother, who passed away in 2020 after a battle with cancer. “And she was our rock. Country music meant a great deal to her.”
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