The Beauty of Song, Part Eight: Reba McEntire

Any attempt to encapsulate Reba McEntire's career on this blog is bound to be a poor one.  As one of the reigning queens of country music, she's accomplished far too much for me to do justice to her long and distinguished career.

Reba McEntire began making country records in 1977 with her self-titled debut album, which she followed with in 1979 with Out Of a Dream.  As the 1980s began, Ms. McEntire gradually found more success on the country charts, but her records were never-rans on the pop album charts, reflecting how far country music had fallen as a commercially potent pop form.  (The crisis in country music's record sales was so profound that in 1985, the New York Times devoted a front-page story about it.)  

Reba kept pegging away, though, and she found herself eking out a place for herself in Nashville.  Her biggest successes came in the late 1980s, having released ten singles from 1986 through 1988. All but two of them topped the Billboard country singles chart. This string of hits included "What Am I Gonna Do About You," "One Promise Too Late," "Love Will Find Its Way to You" and "I Know How He Feels."

Her big eighties albums were two Billboard country-album chart toppers, 1988's Reba and 1989's Sweet Sixteen.  She rode country's commercial resurgence in the nineties, 1995's Starting Over album and 1996's What If It's You LP being particularly successful.

She spent much less time recording in the early twenty-first century to concentrate on her TV sitcom "Reba," in which she played a single mom getting over her dentist ex-husband's remarriage to the dental hygienist he'd been having an affair with.  Needless to say, this show enabled Ms. McEntire to show off her tough-cookie side with a bit of sensitivity. "Reba" lasted from 2001 to 2007.

She also played Annie Oakley twice - in a 1995 miniseries adaption of Larry McMurtry's novel "Buffalo Girls" and in a production of the musical  Annie Get Your Gun.  There's nothing Reba can't do! 

She released her thirty-third album, Stronger Than the Truth, in 2019 to great acclaim.  Reba McEntire continues to be active in Nashville.