They Happened After Reba Walked Into The Song Selection Process And Started Saying No
Reba McEntire already had No. 1 hits and still did not like the records she was making and so in 1984 she took control and told Nashville exactly what My Kind of Country sounded like
Thatβs not country to me
By 1983 Reba McEntire had been recording professionally for years and Mercury had signed her in the 1970s and the climb had been slow with early albums selling modestly and singles coming and going and Nashville spending years trying different ways to package her voice
Eventually the hits arrived and Canβt Even Get the Blues became her first No. 1 in 1983 and Youβre the First Time Iβve Thought About Leaving followed it to the top and Reba was finally succeeding on country radio
But she still felt something was wrong and when her Mercury contract ended Reba signed with MCA and her first album there Just a Little Love came out in January 1984 and it produced another hit but the larger problem remained because after seven albums Reba still felt she had not made a record that sounded like the country music she actually loved
The Phrase Stuck
The frustration came to a head while preparing the next album and Reba later remembered sitting through songs that were presented to her as country material and she kept disagreeing
Finally she was asked the obvious question of what was country to her and Reba kept giving the same answer of my kind of country
More importantly this time she was allowed to do something she had never really been able to do before and choose the songs herself and take meaningful control of her sound and her official discography describes My Kind of Country as the first album where she had that freedom and Harold Shedd produced it
Reba went backward to move forward and she wanted the kind of country she had grown up listening to in Oklahoma with Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette and Ray Price and less concern about crossing over to pop and more steel and fiddle and heartbreak and room for her voice to bend around a lyric
On October 15 1984 MCA released My Kind of Country and the first major payoff was How Blue and it went to No. 1 and then Somebody Should Leave did the same
The Door Stayed Open
But the bigger change happened before the second single had finished its run and at the 1984 CMA Awards Reba McEntire was named Female Vocalist of the Year for the first time and she later remembered the effect as immediate and suddenly people who had been only vaguely aware of her knew exactly who she was
She would win the same CMA award again in 1985 and 1986 and 1987 and the woman who had spent nearly a decade experimenting with songs and clothes and different versions of herself had become the dominant female country vocalist of the middle 1980s
The records kept growing from there and Whoeverβs in New England brought another No. 1 and the first Grammy of Reba and she joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1986 and in 1987 she sold out Carnegie Hall in New York
She became Reba when she finally told Nashville what she would no longer sing
None of those things had happened when Nashville finally discovered some secret new way to manufacture Reba McEntire