Reba McEntire Thought Her Life Was Over After She ‘Got a Little Tongue-Tied’ on Tape
Before Reba McEntire earned her spot as one of country music’s most beloved artists, she worried an explicit slip of the tongue could end her journey to superstardom. And she not only thought her “life was over” for getting tongue-tied, but she was also left wondering what her father would have to say about her recording a song with a bad word in it.
Reba McEntire’s father ‘didn’t go for any fooling around’
When McEntire was a child, she lived on a ranch and helped her father, Clark McEntire, take care of 3,000 head of cattle “from morning till night,” as she wrote in her autobiography, Reba: My Story. She started helping when she was six and had an all-day job by the time she was seven.
That meant she and her two sisters and brother would get up before the sun and prepare for the day. Young as they were, they were expected to take their work and responsibilities as seriously as the adults. She explained their father “didn’t go for any fooling around” and didn’t like to waste time.
So, they worked hard to stay in line and off his radar. “The idea of disobeying Daddy never crossed any of our minds,” she wrote. “We did what we were told when we were told.”
Reba McEntire said ‘s***s’ instead of ‘fits’ in a song and worried what her father would think
As McEntire spent many years doing in childhood, she also worried about disappointing her father when she was an adult. Even after she was on the road to fame, she didn’t want to let him down.
She recalled in her autobiography she was recording a very early song called “I’m a Woman” in which she was supposed to sing, “And if it’s loving you want, I can kiss you and give you the shivering fits.” But she sang “I can kiss you and give you the frivering s***s,” which sounds more like a threat than a romantic gesture.
“I jerked my head up to see if someone was gonna say ‘cut,’ ‘stop,’ or anything, but no one did and I finished the song,” McEntire recalled. Then, her producer told her, “That’s a keeper!”
“I thought my life was over,” McEntire wrote. “What would my Daddy say about me recording a song with that word in it?”
Fortunately for her, her producer was kidding, though he supposedly kept the tape for later laughs. And McEntire concluded, “I could take a joke pretty well.”
Reba McEntire made her father’s heart ‘go to pumpin’ inside’
McEntire wrote in Reba: My Story her father wasn’t always explicit about his pride and affection for his children. “I think my Daddy never learned to show love like a lot of people because of his upbringing and him being an only child,” she shared.
She regretted that he “never” told them he loved them, but she recalled a special time he said it to her. Following a triple bypass when he was in intensive care, she visited him at the hospital. When she told him she had to go meet the bus to get to a show, he told her, “Okay. I love you, honey.”
“That was the only time I ever heard him speak those words to me or anyone else,” she recalled in the early ’90s. But around the same time, he confessed that it “still just [made him] go to pumpin’ inside” every time he saw her on television.
