Free Reba: My Story by Reba McEntire, Tom Carter

Phoenix,’ and ‘Wichita Lineman.’ I would go buy the songbook and the kids would learn the chords right off.”
    Once we got going, the band entertained during lunch breaks, until the noise got to Mr. Toaz and he put his foot down and made us stop, and at all the major high school functions. For example, the senior class would get us to put on a benefit to help them raise money for their year-end trip. We also played all of the school’s home football games, performing before the kickoff and at halftime.
    “And the band was so much better than the footballteam,” Clark Rhyne said, “that at halftime if they didn’t quit playing everybody would be down here watching the band and nobody was watching the football game. We’d just have to make them quit playing, because the crowd—there would be three hundred people gathered up around where the band was picking—the crowd would be requesting songs and saying, ‘Well, don’t quit yet.’ And the football game was going on and we’d just have to pull the plug.”
    We had tremendous success for a group of high school kids. We won virtually every contest we entered, including both the county and district 4-H Club Share-the-Fun Contests. For one of these, we worked up a patriotic medley including “Okie from Muskogee” and wore red, white, and blue outfits. Where we came from, you couldn’t get more patriotic than that. We were Okies too! We even wound up singing at the 4-H State Convention at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

    T HE KIOWA HIGH SCHOOL COWBOY BAND GREW SO POPULAR that it landed some real, paying jobs in honky-tonks and dance halls. We couldn’t have gotten away with that in Tulsa or Oklahoma City, because all of us were minors, too young to legally be inside those places, but in the small towns it was different. Mama and Carol Johnston’s parents would take two carloads of teenage musicians over to the high school, where we would pick up the musical equipment. After the job, the equipment was returned to the school before our parents drove us to our various homes.
    Usually, we were asleep by the time we got out of the parking lot of the club. We were a bunch of kids barely in puberty who didn’t get to bed until almost daylight after some of our shows. Once, we played a club in Ardmore, Oklahoma, from 9 P.M. until 1 A.M. , passed the hat, then played two more sets from 1 A.M. until 3 A.M. We made thirteen dollars apiece.
    The club audiences could be rough, but they gave usgood training in how to work a crowd. Some of those dances turned into fistfights set to music. More often than not, it was so dark in those clubs that we couldn’t even see them fighting. We just thought they were all dancing, and we’d play right through it. When the truth was too obvious to ignore, Clark would tell us, “If a fight breaks out to the left, you go to the right. Don’t stand there on the stage and watch it. Take everyone’s attention to the other direction.”
    And so we did.
    Pake remembered a show where Mama told us on the way home that she thought the crowd really enjoyed our music.
    “Why?” he asked.
    “Because I counted fourteen fights,” she said.
    We were playing in clubs at the time I was baptized at the Kiowa Baptist church, and getting really serious about the right and wrong things in life. I was twelve. One Saturday night when we played the W-H Corral in Sulphur, I told Mama that when I got onstage I planned to ask the audience if they were going to go to church the next morning.
    She just looked at me and smiled.
    “Reba,” she said, “what makes you think those people don’t go to church every Sunday?”
    I was stunned. I had never thought of that.
    “Do you think they do?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said, “but before I got up and started preaching to them and telling them how bad they are, I’d sure find out.”
    That was my first lesson about not judging people. How did I know what they did when they left the