Word: reba
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PERFORMER: REBA MCENTIRE...
...Reba McEntire, 37, is part of country's continental drift. Shouldn't country music mean the whole country, after all? Like fellow Oklahoman Brooks, McEntire is making country music bigger, taking it higher. Her last album, 1991's mournful For My Broken Heart, sold more than 2 million copies, although one track dealt with euthanasia and another with a retirement home...
...from a line in the memoirs of Eudora Welty. K.T. Oslin once made a living as a Broadway chorus girl, and when she turned to country in her mid-40s, it was to sing about such nonbucolic topics as older women sleeping with younger men. Even the down-home Reba McEntire, who spent her youth on her father's ranch and on the rodeo circuit, went on to college, where she studied classical violin and piano and "analyzed Mozart every which...
...bittersweet assessment in 80's Ladies. Meanwhile, Trisha Yearwood sings about a woman with such a sense of autonomy that she demands men "who will cry on my shoulder" but won't "follow me around." And in the new video for the song Is There Life Out There? Reba McEntire refuses to let a too early marriage be an occasion for whining: she goes back to college and gets a degree...
What has given Brooks his edge is serendipity, and a keen sense of timing. "I really admire him," says Reba McEntire. "He has great instincts, and he is great at marketing." Brooks' inspiration was to kick loose, not at the conventions of the music so much as at the constraints governing performance. His music has enough rock echo to catch the ear of anyone fleeing rap or dance synth on the radio, but it's not aggressive or demanding. It certainly isn't haunting -- you'll have to search far afield from Brooks before you glimpse the ghost of Hank...