There are few stars within the realm of country music as universally beloved as Reba McEntire.
Yet amid all that success, McEntire has experienced some hard times as well.
“And you don’t complain.
You don’t b****.
You don’t cry,” she once toldThe Washington Postof the work ethic she inherited from her parents.
“You work twice as hard and have a go at find a better way to do things.
And that’s what I did.”
“I was literally raised on mountain oysters,” she said.
As the third of four children, McEntire experienced the paucity of parental awareness typical of middle kids.
“I had to fight for attention,” she recalled.
“You didn’t have to worry about what was on his mind,” she said.
“He would tell you in a heartbeat.
By our standards, they would say he was cruel.”
That tendency to share unvarnished opinions wound up rubbing off on her, at least to a certain extent.
“That’s where I get my bluntness,” McEntire explained.
“All my friends know exactly where they stand.”
“I didn’t know any better,” she admitted.
“We had a lot of fun,” McEntire said in an interview withCNN.
“We rodeoed together, we ranched together.”
The same year that she and Battles tied the knot, McEntire’s singing career began to take off.
“I guess I chose my career over my marriage,” she explained.
They wound up splitting in 1987.
“I was in and the next day I was out of love,” she toldPeople.
“I think I married my daddy,” she observed in her Washington Post interview.
It also didn’t help that McEntire had often discussed her husband in interviews.
McEntire addressed the negative response she’d been receiving from fans when she spoke withPeoplein 1989.
“My fans didn’t understand.”
“I told them it was my business and they’d have to trust me,” she explained.
“I told her, ‘Don’t stay because of me,'” she recalled.
A loss of that magnitude hit her hard, and McEntire was devastated.
While McEntire may have considered packing it in, she simply couldn’t stop.
“I can’t stop working when something like that happens,” she told The Washington Post.
“I needed it.
We all needed it, to keep going, or I would have wallowed in sorrow.”
“Tell folks in your life how much you love and appreciate them.”
“Reba, why do you always want to do something you’re not good at?”
she recalled him asking her.
In 2014, McEntire’s father died at age 86; he’d reportedly been ill for some time.
According to the singer, she inherited his competitive nature.
That competitive spirt, she revealed, was in play in one of her favorite memories of him.
“Daddy said, ‘Sure is good to be riding home with the winner,'” she recalled.
In August 2015, after more than a quarter-century of marriage, McEntire and Blackstock split up.
Their divorce was finalized a few months later, with McEntire making it official in aFacebook post.
“Narvel and I are divorced.
It was final October 28,” she wrote.
“It was a bombshell.
‘I didn’t want it in any shape, form, or fashion.
So it was really hard to make the adjustment.”
Because her ex was so embroiled in her business affairs, the divorce proved a costly one.
“I think it works for some people.
That emphasis on business was such an omnipresent factor in their relationship that it even extended to their downtime.
She had been taken by illness.
“Oh, I didn’t want to [sing],” she said.
She said, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘Because I always sang for Mama.'”
That, she recalled, was something that went back as far as she could remember.
“We were the singing McEntires.”
“I really did,” she said.
“Radio [is] so competitive, and they are looking at the younger generations for music.”
“This ‘bro’ thing has lasted a lot longer than I thought it would,” she said.
“I’m ready for it to change.”
While their relationship seems to be solid, they haven’t been without their sad moments.
“He was a GRAND CHAMPION in the Show Ring, but a grander one in life.”
Audience response proved so enthusiastic that she added 14 extra dates for spring 2023.
She’s an entitled brat."
McEntire addressed the rumor viaInstagram, including a screenshot of that post and confirming it was completely bogus.
“yo don’t believe everything you see on the Internet,” McEntire wrote in the caption.
“I did not say this.
