Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

In 2014, Reba McEntire walked into a recording studio to prepare a song for her father’s funeral. Clark McEntire was still alive. A stroke had left the three-time world champion steer roper gravely ill, and uncertainty had settled over the family’s Oklahoma ranch. Reba later said they prepared his funeral several times because each time his condition seemed final, he rallied again. The service could be planned. The date could not. Then songwriter Liz Hengber sent Reba “Just Like Them Horses.” Hengber had begun the song for a friend dying of cancer but found herself unable to finish it; Tommy Lee James helped bring it to completion. When Reba heard the result, she did not first imagine radio or an album. She thought of Clark. Horses had carried nearly every part of his life. He left school young, became one of rodeo’s finest steer ropers, and used his winnings—including a car and $500 he had saved—to begin acquiring land in Oklahoma. The ranch grew alongside his reputation. Reba and her siblings grew up working there, following him to rodeos and learning the discipline that would later shape her own career. She planned to record the song simply, with piano and voice, so it could be played when the family finally had to bury him. Producer Tony Brown heard something larger in the performance and persuaded her that it belonged on her next album as well. Clark died on October 23, 2014, not long after the recording was completed. He was 86. The song Reba had made in anticipation of that day was played at his funeral before appearing on her 2015 album, Love Somebody. The story could have ended with the service. Reba carried it back to Chockie instead. For the 2016 music video, she returned to the McEntire homeplace and filmed the Oklahoma hills in black and white. The horses belonged naturally to Clark’s world, but Reba insisted that her mother, Jacqueline, appear too. Jacqueline drove into the frame in a pickup truck—the woman Reba described as the ranch’s partner, bookkeeper, cook, hired hand and family glue. A song prepared for one parent’s departure became a record of what the other had held together. Clark’s absence gave the film its grief. Jacqueline’s presence gave it a life that continued after him.

Hinh website 2026 10 14T142020.016
“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”
Hinh fb 2026 10 14T142014.589

REBA McENTIRE RECORDED THE GOODBYE BEFORE HER FATHER WAS GONE

Four Services Without a Date

The McEntire family learned to prepare for Clark’s death without knowing when it would arrive.

After suffering a stroke in 2011, he fell into a coma. He survived the initial crisis, but his health remained fragile for years. Reba later recalled that the family prepared his funeral about four times. Each preparation required them to approach the same impossible threshold: selecting music, considering the service and arranging the words that would be used when Clark could no longer hear them.

Then he would improve.

The plans were put aside, but not discarded. His family understood that the reprieve did not amount to recovery. Their waiting simply resumed.

For Reba, whose professional life was organized around dates, rehearsals and precisely timed entrances, this was a different kind of calendar. There was no tour manager who could tell her when the next call would come. Her father was alive, yet the family had already been made to imagine the room without him.

That was the space into which “Just Like Them Horses” arrived.

The Cowboy Who Built Outward

Clark McEntire had made his life through rodeo before any of his children became famous.

He left school after the ninth grade and entered the working world surrounding cattle and competition. At nineteen, he won the all-around title at the 1947 Pendleton Round-Up. He later captured three world championships in steer roping—in 1957, 1958 and 1961—and entered the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 1979.

His winnings became something more permanent. According to the Hall of Fame, Clark won a car in the early 1950s and combined it with $500 he had saved to acquire forty acres south of Kiowa, Oklahoma. Over time, that foothold expanded into thousands of acres of grazing land.

His children knew the work behind those numbers. Reba grew up hauling feed, helping with cattle and traveling the rodeo circuit with her siblings. Clark’s standards could be severe. He was not a father known for easy declarations of affection, and Reba has spoken about wanting his approval long after she had begun receiving applause from entire arenas.

The ranch taught love in another dialect: work completed, animals tended, instructions followed, the next morning met on time.

A Song Written Inside Another Family’s Grief

“Just Like Them Horses” did not begin with Clark McEntire.

Liz Hengber started writing it while facing the approaching death of a friend with cancer. The emotion became difficult to finish on her own, so she turned to fellow songwriter Tommy Lee James, who supplied the music and helped complete the piece.

That origin mattered. Reba was not taking language written specifically about a famous cowboy and fitting it neatly over her father’s life. She recognized Clark inside a song that had first belonged to somebody else’s impending loss.

The horses made the connection immediate, but the deeper fit was in the act of release. Clark had spent his life controlling ropes, cattle, land and the movement of animals. His final years placed him beyond the reach of that physical authority. The song allowed Reba to picture departure in terms that still belonged to him—not a hospital room or failing body, but open ground and forward motion.

She decided she wanted it for the funeral.

At that point, the recording was not meant to be a commercial statement. It was family preparation.

The Session Tony Brown Would Not Let Disappear

Reba entered the studio intending to make a spare recording, principally piano and voice. The purpose was practical and painfully specific: when Clark died, the family would already have the song.

Producer Tony Brown heard the performance and resisted allowing it to remain private. He believed it belonged on the album they were making.

His judgment changed the future of the recording without altering its first obligation. It would still serve at Clark’s funeral. But afterward, it would travel beyond the McEntire family and reach listeners carrying their own unfinished farewells.

This was one of the quieter decisions in Reba’s career. There was no calculated search for a grief anthem and no attempt to build a promotional event around her father’s illness. A daughter had prepared music for a service that kept being postponed. A producer heard that the recording could stand outside the room for which it had been made.

They kept it.

October 23, 2014

Clark McEntire died in Coalgate, Oklahoma, on October 23, 2014. He was 86.

The recording was ready.

At his funeral, the family heard the song in the setting Reba had imagined before his death. By then, its meaning had already crossed a boundary. In the studio, she had sung toward an event still waiting somewhere ahead. At the service, anticipation became memory.

Several months later, “Just Like Them Horses” appeared on Love Somebody. Reba dedicated the recording to her parents. The album reached listeners who knew little about steer roping, Chockie or the long period in which the McEntires had repeatedly prepared to lose Clark.

They did not need those facts to understand the song. But for Reba, the facts remained inside every line.

Taking the Song Back to Chockie

When the time came to make a video, Reba did not construct Clark’s world on a soundstage.

She returned to the McEntire homeplace in Chockie. The hills had formed the horizon of her first twenty-one years, long before Nashville, television or Las Vegas made her recognizable far beyond Oklahoma. In November weather, she filmed the land and horses in black and white.

The concept was hers. Reba said she had never previously served as the concept creator or director of one of her videos, but this one arrived in her mind with enough force that she felt compelled to follow it.

That choice kept the tribute from becoming an illustrated biography. There are no reenactments of championship rodeos and no actor pretending to be Clark in his prime. The camera moves through the country that remained after him. His absence is carried by the terrain rather than performed for it.

The ranch does not need to be told whom it has lost.

The Woman Driving the Truck

Reba also understood that the homeplace could not be shown honestly with only Clark’s memory in it.

Jacqueline McEntire had married him in 1950 and raised Alice, Pake, Reba and Susie while helping sustain the ranch. Reba described her mother’s contribution in the language of work: partner, bookkeeper, hired hand and cook. Jacqueline also taught the children to sing harmony during long rodeo trips, turning crowded car rides into the earliest rehearsals of the Singing McEntires.

In the video, Jacqueline does not stand beneath theatrical lighting and deliver a speech about widowhood. She drives a truck across the land and meets her daughter.

Her presence changes the tribute. The ranch was associated publicly with Clark—the champion roper whose winnings helped build it—but the camera acknowledges the labor that made his life possible between competitions. Jacqueline had kept accounts, fed people, worked beside him and held the family together through the years when the rodeo cowboy was away.

Reba began with a song for her father. By bringing her mother into the frame, she widened the family record.

What Reba’s Farewell Really Leaves Behind

Clark’s story contains the kind of achievements that fit easily onto plaques: three world championships, famous rodeo victories, a Hall of Fame induction and acreage accumulated from a small beginning.

Jacqueline’s work was harder to summarize. It happened in ledgers, kitchens, vehicles and the daily maintenance of a family whose public story would eventually become much larger than the ranch.

“Just Like Them Horses” preserved both kinds of labor.

The song carried Clark out in the imagery of the life he had chosen. The video then remained on the homeplace long enough to recognize the person who had kept that life functioning. Years after a daughter entered a studio to prepare for her father’s death, the final family portrait did not belong solely to the person leaving.

It also belonged to the woman still driving across the land.

Video

Related Post

Country Music

One afternoon in Nashville, Mel Tillis was trapped in traffic when Johnny Cash came through the radio singing “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” The title stirred another sentence in Tillis’s head: “Ruby, don’t take your love to town.” The name was invented. The marriage behind it was not. As a boy in Pahokee, Florida, Tillis had lived near a disabled veteran and his wife. Years later, he remembered lying in his bedroom and hearing the couple argue as she dressed to go out. The husband’s body had been damaged by war; whatever remained of the marriage was being worn down inside the house. Tillis carried that memory into the song. He placed the listener beside a paralyzed veteran who can hear his wife preparing to leave but cannot rise to stop her. He recognizes her loneliness even while begging her to stay. By the final verse, the sound of a closing door has become more threatening than anything the narrator experienced overseas. Tillis later said the song concerned the Korean War, although many listeners assumed it was about Vietnam because that conflict filled American television when the record became famous. The confusion gave “Ruby” an unintended immediacy. Families were watching young men leave for Asia while the song asked what happened after a wounded soldier returned home. Johnny Darrell carried it to No. 9 on the country chart in 1967. Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Bobby Bare and others also recorded it. Then Kenny Rogers and the First Edition approached the song in 1969 while trying to move beyond the psychedelic sound of “Just Dropped In.” Rogers sang it without theatrical anger. His narrator sounded trapped between suspicion, tenderness and humiliation. The record reached No. 6 on the American pop chart and No. 2 in Britain, carrying a Florida household’s private argument far beyond country radio. Listeners never learn whether Ruby is meeting another man. They know only what her husband fears while hearing her footsteps move toward the door. That uncertainty is what Tillis preserved. The veteran has survived the war, but the song does not offer him the simpler dignity of a heroic return. It leaves him in a room where the battle is over, the evening is beginning, and the woman he loves is still young enough to walk away.

Country Music

The Boy Who Learned to Forgive Without Receiving His Childhood Back Ronnie Milsap learned why his mother was gone from the men who remained. His father and uncle told him that she had rejected him because he was blind. She believed his blindness was a disgrace and, according to the family account Ronnie carried into adulthood, a punishment from God. Before he was old enough to understand either blindness or punishment, he had been left with his grandparents in the mountains of western North Carolina. They lived in severe poverty, in a small house without the conveniences that would have made raising a blind child easier. Yet Ronnie remembered love there. His grandparents took him to church, where he discovered that he could hear a melody a few times and retain it. A battery-powered Philco radio brought distant stations into the house at night. He learned songs before he understood how far the voices had traveled to reach him. At six, the family sent him hundreds of miles away to the State School for the Blind in Raleigh. Ronnie remembered standing there after his relatives had gone home, unsure whether they were coming back. The departure resembled another abandonment to a child who had already been told that his own mother did not want him. The school became the place where his life widened. Teachers recognized his ear. He studied violin, piano and other instruments, eventually receiving years of classical training. The institution that first felt like exile gave him tools with which to construct an independent life. Milsap did not later disguise what his mother’s rejection had done. He spoke about it plainly even after becoming one of the most successful singers of the 1970s and 1980s. But he also resisted building his identity around resentment. Asked about her beliefs, he acknowledged that a frightened young mother may not have understood what to do with a blind child. “Over your life,” he said, “you learn to forgive everything.” The sentence did not make the childhood whole. It did not move his mother back into the mountain house or return to the six-year-old standing alone in Raleigh. Forgiveness, as Milsap described it, was something he practiced without pretending the wound had never existed. Years later, he and his wife Joyce raised their son, Todd, and became grandparents to three children. In interviews, Ronnie spoke of those grandchildren as the loves of their lives. The boy once sent away because adults feared what blindness meant eventually built a family in which children were not treated as signs of punishment. They were welcomed as gifts.

Country Music

In the mid-1970s, Ronnie Dunn was attending a religious college in Abilene, Texas, while slipping away at night to sing in West Texas bars for beer money. The two lives could not remain separate for long. School administrators learned about the band and gave him a choice: stop performing in the clubs or leave the university. Dunn left. For him, the decision reached far beyond a classroom. His father was a hard-living truck driver, oil-field worker and country singer whom Ronnie later described as an alcoholic honky-tonker. His mother was a deeply religious Baptist who worked as a bank bookkeeper and hospital telephone operator. One parent represented the barroom life pulling at him; the other had hoped her son might enter the ministry. Ronnie had tried to follow her road. He later admitted that studying in Abilene was partly an effort to fulfill the dream his mother and grandfather held for him. Singing in clubs felt natural. Disappointing them did not. He carried the guilt long after leaving school. The bars supplied a different education. There were no quiet audiences waiting respectfully for a song to end. The band had to keep people dancing, read the room and survive the arguments that sometimes arrived with the bill. Dunn learned to make his voice rise above conversation, glassware and the scrape of boots on a floor. After Abilene, he moved into the Tulsa music scene and eventually fronted the house band at Duke’s Country. Years passed before the rest of the industry noticed. An independent recording deal produced little. A national talent contest finally brought him to Nashville, where he was paired with Kix Brooks in 1990. Brooks & Dunn soon became one of the largest acts in country music, but success did not settle the old division inside Ronnie. He continued writing about churches and taverns, belief and appetite, good intentions and the trouble waiting just beyond them. In 2003, that tension surfaced plainly in “Red Dirt Road.” The song placed finding Jesus, drinking a first beer and wrecking a first car along the same rural route. None of the memories canceled the others. The young man who left Abilene believed he had chosen the honky-tonk over the life his mother wanted. Decades later, when he finally wrote the road that had formed him, church and barroom were still standing within walking distance of each other.

You Missed

Country Music

One afternoon in Nashville, Mel Tillis was trapped in traffic when Johnny Cash came through the radio singing “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” The title stirred another sentence in Tillis’s head: “Ruby, don’t take your love to town.” The name was invented. The marriage behind it was not. As a boy in Pahokee, Florida, Tillis had lived near a disabled veteran and his wife. Years later, he remembered lying in his bedroom and hearing the couple argue as she dressed to go out. The husband’s body had been damaged by war; whatever remained of the marriage was being worn down inside the house. Tillis carried that memory into the song. He placed the listener beside a paralyzed veteran who can hear his wife preparing to leave but cannot rise to stop her. He recognizes her loneliness even while begging her to stay. By the final verse, the sound of a closing door has become more threatening than anything the narrator experienced overseas. Tillis later said the song concerned the Korean War, although many listeners assumed it was about Vietnam because that conflict filled American television when the record became famous. The confusion gave “Ruby” an unintended immediacy. Families were watching young men leave for Asia while the song asked what happened after a wounded soldier returned home. Johnny Darrell carried it to No. 9 on the country chart in 1967. Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Bobby Bare and others also recorded it. Then Kenny Rogers and the First Edition approached the song in 1969 while trying to move beyond the psychedelic sound of “Just Dropped In.” Rogers sang it without theatrical anger. His narrator sounded trapped between suspicion, tenderness and humiliation. The record reached No. 6 on the American pop chart and No. 2 in Britain, carrying a Florida household’s private argument far beyond country radio. Listeners never learn whether Ruby is meeting another man. They know only what her husband fears while hearing her footsteps move toward the door. That uncertainty is what Tillis preserved. The veteran has survived the war, but the song does not offer him the simpler dignity of a heroic return. It leaves him in a room where the battle is over, the evening is beginning, and the woman he loves is still young enough to walk away.

Country Music

The Boy Who Learned to Forgive Without Receiving His Childhood Back Ronnie Milsap learned why his mother was gone from the men who remained. His father and uncle told him that she had rejected him because he was blind. She believed his blindness was a disgrace and, according to the family account Ronnie carried into adulthood, a punishment from God. Before he was old enough to understand either blindness or punishment, he had been left with his grandparents in the mountains of western North Carolina. They lived in severe poverty, in a small house without the conveniences that would have made raising a blind child easier. Yet Ronnie remembered love there. His grandparents took him to church, where he discovered that he could hear a melody a few times and retain it. A battery-powered Philco radio brought distant stations into the house at night. He learned songs before he understood how far the voices had traveled to reach him. At six, the family sent him hundreds of miles away to the State School for the Blind in Raleigh. Ronnie remembered standing there after his relatives had gone home, unsure whether they were coming back. The departure resembled another abandonment to a child who had already been told that his own mother did not want him. The school became the place where his life widened. Teachers recognized his ear. He studied violin, piano and other instruments, eventually receiving years of classical training. The institution that first felt like exile gave him tools with which to construct an independent life. Milsap did not later disguise what his mother’s rejection had done. He spoke about it plainly even after becoming one of the most successful singers of the 1970s and 1980s. But he also resisted building his identity around resentment. Asked about her beliefs, he acknowledged that a frightened young mother may not have understood what to do with a blind child. “Over your life,” he said, “you learn to forgive everything.” The sentence did not make the childhood whole. It did not move his mother back into the mountain house or return to the six-year-old standing alone in Raleigh. Forgiveness, as Milsap described it, was something he practiced without pretending the wound had never existed. Years later, he and his wife Joyce raised their son, Todd, and became grandparents to three children. In interviews, Ronnie spoke of those grandchildren as the loves of their lives. The boy once sent away because adults feared what blindness meant eventually built a family in which children were not treated as signs of punishment. They were welcomed as gifts.

Country Music

In 2014, Reba McEntire walked into a recording studio to prepare a song for her father’s funeral. Clark McEntire was still alive. A stroke had left the three-time world champion steer roper gravely ill, and uncertainty had settled over the family’s Oklahoma ranch. Reba later said they prepared his funeral several times because each time his condition seemed final, he rallied again. The service could be planned. The date could not. Then songwriter Liz Hengber sent Reba “Just Like Them Horses.” Hengber had begun the song for a friend dying of cancer but found herself unable to finish it; Tommy Lee James helped bring it to completion. When Reba heard the result, she did not first imagine radio or an album. She thought of Clark. Horses had carried nearly every part of his life. He left school young, became one of rodeo’s finest steer ropers, and used his winnings—including a car and $500 he had saved—to begin acquiring land in Oklahoma. The ranch grew alongside his reputation. Reba and her siblings grew up working there, following him to rodeos and learning the discipline that would later shape her own career. She planned to record the song simply, with piano and voice, so it could be played when the family finally had to bury him. Producer Tony Brown heard something larger in the performance and persuaded her that it belonged on her next album as well. Clark died on October 23, 2014, not long after the recording was completed. He was 86. The song Reba had made in anticipation of that day was played at his funeral before appearing on her 2015 album, Love Somebody. The story could have ended with the service. Reba carried it back to Chockie instead. For the 2016 music video, she returned to the McEntire homeplace and filmed the Oklahoma hills in black and white. The horses belonged naturally to Clark’s world, but Reba insisted that her mother, Jacqueline, appear too. Jacqueline drove into the frame in a pickup truck—the woman Reba described as the ranch’s partner, bookkeeper, cook, hired hand and family glue. A song prepared for one parent’s departure became a record of what the other had held together. Clark’s absence gave the film its grief. Jacqueline’s presence gave it a life that continued after him.

Country Music

In the mid-1970s, Ronnie Dunn was attending a religious college in Abilene, Texas, while slipping away at night to sing in West Texas bars for beer money. The two lives could not remain separate for long. School administrators learned about the band and gave him a choice: stop performing in the clubs or leave the university. Dunn left. For him, the decision reached far beyond a classroom. His father was a hard-living truck driver, oil-field worker and country singer whom Ronnie later described as an alcoholic honky-tonker. His mother was a deeply religious Baptist who worked as a bank bookkeeper and hospital telephone operator. One parent represented the barroom life pulling at him; the other had hoped her son might enter the ministry. Ronnie had tried to follow her road. He later admitted that studying in Abilene was partly an effort to fulfill the dream his mother and grandfather held for him. Singing in clubs felt natural. Disappointing them did not. He carried the guilt long after leaving school. The bars supplied a different education. There were no quiet audiences waiting respectfully for a song to end. The band had to keep people dancing, read the room and survive the arguments that sometimes arrived with the bill. Dunn learned to make his voice rise above conversation, glassware and the scrape of boots on a floor. After Abilene, he moved into the Tulsa music scene and eventually fronted the house band at Duke’s Country. Years passed before the rest of the industry noticed. An independent recording deal produced little. A national talent contest finally brought him to Nashville, where he was paired with Kix Brooks in 1990. Brooks & Dunn soon became one of the largest acts in country music, but success did not settle the old division inside Ronnie. He continued writing about churches and taverns, belief and appetite, good intentions and the trouble waiting just beyond them. In 2003, that tension surfaced plainly in “Red Dirt Road.” The song placed finding Jesus, drinking a first beer and wrecking a first car along the same rural route. None of the memories canceled the others. The young man who left Abilene believed he had chosen the honky-tonk over the life his mother wanted. Decades later, when he finally wrote the road that had formed him, church and barroom were still standing within walking distance of each other.