She sang the goodbye before she knew the day she would have to hear it played back
In 2014 Reba McEntire walked into a recording studio not chasing a hit but preparing for a loss she could not schedule. Her father Clark McEntire was still alive yet gravely ill after the stroke that had left him in a coma in 2011. He survived that first crisis but his health stayed fragile for years and uncertainty settled over the family ranch in Oklahoma. Reba later recalled that the family prepared his funeral about four times. Each time his condition looked final and each time Clark rallied again and the plans were quietly set aside.
The service could be planned but the date could not
Into that painful waiting came a song from songwriter Liz Hengber called βJust Like Them Horses.β Hengber had started it for a friend dying of cancer and could not finish it on her own until Tommy Lee James helped her complete the work. When Reba heard it she did not first think about radio or an album. She thought of Clark and the horses that had carried nearly every chapter of his life.
Clark left school after the ninth grade and built his future around cattle and competition. At nineteen he won the all around title at the 1947 Pendleton Round-Up. He went on to become a three time world champion steer roper with titles in 1957 and 1958 and 1961 and he earned a place in the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. With winnings that included a car and the 500 dollars he had saved he began buying land in Oklahoma. The ranch grew as his reputation grew and Reba and her siblings grew up working that land and following him to rodeos while learning the discipline that would later shape her own career.
Reba planned the recording in the simplest possible way with only piano and voice so it could be played when the family finally had to bury him. Producer Tony Brown heard something larger in that intimate performance and persuaded her that the song also belonged on her next album. Clark died on October 23 2014 not long after the recording was finished. He was 86. The farewell she had made in anticipation of that day was played at his funeral before it appeared on her 2015 album Love Somebody.
The story might have ended at the service but Reba carried the song home to Chockie instead. For the 2016 music video she returned to the McEntire homeplace and filmed the Oklahoma hills in black and white during November weather. Those hills had shaped the horizon of her first twenty one years long before Nashville and television and Las Vegas carried her name far beyond home. The concept was hers and she said she had never before created the concept or directed one of her videos. There would be no reenactments of championship rides and no actor playing Clark in his prime. The land itself would carry his absence.
Reba also insisted that her mother Jacqueline appear because the homeplace could not be told honestly through Clark alone. Jacqueline married Clark in 1950 and raised Alice and Pake and Reba and Susie while helping sustain the ranch. She taught the children to sing harmony on long rodeo trips and turned crowded car rides into the earliest rehearsals of the Singing McEntires. Reba described her mother as the ranch partner and bookkeeper and cook and hired hand and the glue that held the family together.
Partner and bookkeeper and cook and hired hand
In the video Jacqueline does not deliver a speech about grief. She drives into the frame in a pickup truck and meets her daughter on the land she helped keep alive. That quiet arrival transforms the tribute. Clark gave the film its sorrow through his absence while Jacqueline gave it proof that life on the ranch continued after him. A song prepared for one parent leaving became a lasting portrait of the other parent who had held everything together.