Reba McEntire's parents sing praises
CMAPerformer has most nominations of any woman

STRINGTOWN — The "Little Giant,” a bear leaning against Daddy’s horse trailer, and running past the rattlesnakes and over the railroad tracks to the roping pen may seem like an odd mix.

However, that’s actually a one-sentence summary of the childhood of the record holder for the most Country Music Association award nominations by a female artist: Reba Nell McEntire. Clark and Jackie McEntire’s third of four children garnered two more nominations this year for the CMA awards scheduled for Nov. 11 in Nashville, Tenn. That extends her career total to 48.

It’s been 75 years since John McEntire, her "grandpap,” won the Steer Roping World Champion title, a feat her father repeated in 1957, 1958 and 1961. It’s been 35 years since Clem McSpadden hired Reba to sing the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City. It’s been 25 years since she won the first of four straight CMA Female Vocalist of the Year awards, which she is contending for again this year. These are interesting threads of her life.

But if you want to hear some good yarns about the young Reba — ones including the "Little Giant,” the bear and the rattlesnakes — then it’s best to sit down with the sources, Clark and Jackie.

An "Away in a Manger” solo at a first-grade Christmas play marked Reba’s school entertainment debut. But a performance two years later remains a source of family history and pride.

That year some of the senior girls at Kiowa High School asked a third-grader named Reba to sing at their graduation.

"She sang ‘He,’ which is a pretty hard song to sing,” Jackie said. "Carl Albert was the speaker at that graduation. When she got through singing and he got up to speak, he said ‘I predict that this child will be as well or better known and famous as her daddy if she continues on.’”

At 5 feet, 41/2 inches, Albert — who served three decades in the U.S. Congress — was known as "The Little Giant.”

What did Clark, already a three-time world champion roper, think of the prediction?

"I was proud that he said that,” Clark said. "He wrote her a letter after she did get famous and he wrote word for word what he said at that graduation.”

"It impressed everybody,” Jackie recalls.

Clark laughs when he thinks back to the start of his daughter’s music career and how some people thought of Reba as this little red-haired girl who’d probably never strayed too far from the country around Limestone Gap in southeastern Oklahoma.

"She’d been to more than 20 states before she ever went to singing,” Clark said.

At least a few times a year, Jackie and the children — Alice, Pake, Reba and the youngest, Susie — would hit the trail with Daddy. Most of the time the old Chevy sedan, pulling a horse trailer, was headed for a rodeo. But every now and then they’d get a break, such as when the McEntire family visited Yellowstone National Park.

While they were gawking at Old Faithful a bear was gawking at Clark’s roping horse.

"His front paws were up on the trailer,” Clark said. "The old horse didn’t get excited about it.”

Maybe the horse wasn’t nervous, but Jackie said "The kids were wide-eyed and I was too.”

In 1951, Clark won the calf roping contest at Carrollton, Texas, and received a new car.

With Jackie expecting their first child, she traded the car and $500 "to boot” for some land in a community in Atoka County which consisted of a Baptist church and a cemetery. They lived there until 1957 when Reba was 2.

At that time they moved to Chockie in Atoka County, which is 12 miles south of Kiowa in Pittsburg County.

"We lived there 34 years,” Jackie said of Chockie. "The roping pen was across the railroad tracks and that was their playground.”

"The rattlesnakes were thick between the house and the roping pen,” Clark added.

No problem.

"Clark kept the arena plowed up because that’s where he practiced calf roping and steer roping,” Jackie said. "So those little kids, Reba and Susie, would just play in the dirt.”

Or during certain times of the year, they’d go with Daddy to do chores.

When Reba was about 5 years old, Clark would get her to drive the truck so he could kick off the hay to the cattle in the Oklahoma winters. He’d put a 50 pound sack of cattle feed in the driver’s seat, put the truck in "granny gear” and hop out of the truck.

She was told to "go as straight as you can and stay away from the bigger rocks and trees.”

It didn’t work all the time, evidenced by the bark skinned all the way up to the second limb of the elm trees.

But if they weren’t playing or working they were often singing, just as Jackie had done while growing up.

"At night we didn’t have a radio or television or anything like that,” Jackie said of her childhood. "So the whole family sang.

"The singing just passes down from generation to generation.”

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