Reba McEntire: A Lighthearted Prank Once Exposed How Little Her Family Liked Her Boyfriend
When Reba McEntire was in college, she dated Bobby Shillings before her first marriage. And she once pulled a playful prank on her rodeo family that inadvertently exposed how they felt about the college sweethearts staying together forever. “If he didn’t know before that my family didn’t want me to marry him,” McEntire wrote in her autobiography, “he definitely knew then.”
Reba McEntire’s serious romances before her first marriage
As McEntire recalled in her autobiography, Reba: My Story, she had a couple of serious romances before her first husband, Charlie Battles. One was with Shillings, but before that was her high school boyfriend, Rick Wilson, who proposed to her on their third date.
She dated him sporadically through the end of high school and the beginning of college. But she decided to end it when he made demands that didn’t jive with her plans.
According to her, he called her up one morning and told her he was going to come to pick her up from college. They were getting married in Dallas and honeymooning in Hawaii, he said.
McEntire shared she’d been partying the night before, and he called at 7 a.m. “Rick,” she said, “I am not going to get married. I’m having way too good a time in college.”
She asked him not to call back and hung up. Of course, he didn’t respect that wish. “Don’t you ever hang up on me again!” she remembered him yelling when she picked up the phone again. But she was ready to move on.
“After Rick came Bobby Shillings, who I met in college,” McEntire wrote. “He was good-looking, but somewhat of a renegade — not quite what Daddy and Mama had in mind for me for matrimony.”
Reba McEntire ‘felt terrible’ for Bobby Shillings after her family’s reaction to a prank
McEntire shared in her autobiography she called her family’s home and talked to her sister, Susie, while she was dating Shillings. But she wasn’t calling her up for a sisterly chat. She told her to share the news she was headed to Louisiana to get married. Then, she hung up.
“Susie liked to have died,” McEntire said. “She started crying and went to Mama and told her what I had said.”
Her mother very calmly called the Highway Patrol in an attempt to have them picked up by authorities. The McEntire family didn’t realize the young couple was just headed to their house.
McEntire said they drove up the driveway to find her family gathered at the door. Though she was 19 then, she said she thought her mother would whip her. “What do you mean scaring your little sister that way?” she asked while holding onto a braided leather cord.
“It was a joke,” McEntire said she yelled, but Susie wouldn’t talk to her.
“I felt terrible for Bobby,” she concluded. “If he didn’t know before that my family didn’t want me to marry him, he definitely knew then.”
Charlie Battles and Bobby Shillings scuffled over Reb McEntire’s honor
Another story McEntire recalled in her autobiography came from the time she was dating Battles, following her breakup with Shillings. She said Battles “kind of impressed her” when he threw her ex through a window for giving her the middle finger at a dance.
“I was a little shocked and embarrassed by Charlie’s actions, but kind of impressed too,” she noted. “No one had ever fought for me before.”
Shillings walked away, seemingly unharmed. And McEntire eventually married Battles in 1976, though it wasn’t a happy union for long. They divorced in the late ’80s, prior to her 26-year marriage to Narvel Blackstock.
