“We didn’t have a radio in the car.”
That is how Reba McEntire started the story when she sat down with Willie Geist for Sunday TODAY. The interview aired in April 2023. Hello! magazine printed her words the day after it ran.
Reba is easy to find these days. At 71, she plays bar owner Bobbie on NBC’s “Happy’s Place,” which came back for its third season on Oct. 23 and airs on Friday nights. Viewers who know her mostly from television may not know how far back the music goes, or that it started on the highway.
She was born in McAlester, Okla., in 1955 and grew up on a cattle ranch. There were four McEntire children. Alice came first, then Pake, then Reba, then Susie.
Their father, Clark McEntire, was a three-time world champion steer roper. The Horatio Alger Association honored Reba in 2018, and its profile of her says his best year on the circuit was 1957, when he earned $5,184. At home, ranch work came first. Reba was riding horses at 3 and gathering cattle by 7. “We worked hard and we played hard,” she says in that profile.
When Clark competed, the family went along to watch. That meant hours on the road with four kids across the back seat and nothing to listen to. Reba told Geist they spent a good part of those rides “rough-housin’.”
Their mother, Jacqueline, had taught school until her first child was born. She had a history with music too. According to the Horatio Alger profile, she wanted to be a country singer when she was young, and the chance never came.
So she turned the back seat into a choir.
“Our car didn’t have a radio, so my mother taught us to sing in harmony,” Reba says in the profile. She told Geist the same thing in fewer words: “Mama would get us to sing to pass the time.” And in a 2025 interview with Esquire, she put it this way: “Mama taught all of us kids how to sing.”
The lessons stuck. Pake, Reba and Susie became a trio and took the family name on stage. “We were the Singing McEntires,” Reba told Geist.
They started where their father worked. “We sang at rodeos, and when we were older we got some paying jobs in honky-tonks and dance halls,” Reba says in the profile. The money was nothing to brag about. “At the end of the night, we would each make about $13.”
Jacqueline’s coaching went past harmony. Reba told Geist she sang “Away in a Manger” at a school Christmas program in first grade, and she was nervous about it. “Well, Mama was encouraging me, saying, ‘It’ll be fine. You can do it.'”
The little redhead found out she liked what happened next. “I wanted attention,” she said. “And I figured out the best kind of attention I could get was when I would sing.”
TODAY posted the sit-down on its own channel. It runs a little over eight minutes, and Reba covers her start in music and her family.
Reba looks back on her family and her start in music with Willie Geist
The rodeo kept opening doors for her. As a college student, Reba sang the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City. Country singer Red Steagall was there that day, and he invited her to Nashville to record a demo. She has been making records ever since, and she joined the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2011.
In 2018, Reba thanked her mother in a Facebook post. “Not only did she teach us kids to sing harmony,” she wrote, “she also served five school districts for almost 20 years as a teacher, secretary and librarian!”
She ended the post with a line any teacher’s child would understand: “Thanks Mama for the education you gave to us and so many other kids throughout Oklahoma.”