Staying Fit
Robby Klein
Three-time Grammy Award winner Reba McEntire, 67, just wrapped up a fall concert tour, so you’d think she’d be ready to relax and take a break. But you’d be wrong. She’s busy playing Sunny Barnes, the feisty matriarch on ABC’s drama Big Sky, and is producing and starring in an upcoming Lifetime movie, The Hammer, about a traveling circuit judge. She’s also opening Reba's Place, a restaurant, bar and live music venue in southern Oklahoma, and is promoting her album, The Ultimate Christmas Collection, which features tried-and-true favorites plus the song “I Needed Christmas” from her 2021 Lifetime movie Christmas In Tune. Best of all? She’s still having fun.
Do you have a favorite Christmas tradition?
We had a lot of traditions. Then, when I got divorced, I started making new ones. So every year, everything’s been different, doing something different. [Actor] Rex Linn and I have been together for three years. And so we just think up new things to do to make it interesting.
Where is home for the holidays?
It'll be in Nashville, Tennessee. [Rex and I have] been in Albuquerque [New Mexico] since July 3, shooting Big Sky, so we’ll be ready to come home.
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What’s the best gift you’ve ever received or given?
Well, we kind of outdid ourselves a couple of Christmases ago. Rex gave me an upright piano that was about a hundred years old, and I gave him a brand new set of drums, because he’s a drummer. I just love to play the piano. I’m not that good, but I like to tinker around on it. I think that was high on the list.
Do the two of you play duets with your gifts?
No. We’d have a hard time doing that because mine’s in the house and his is way out in the party barn.
Would you consider making another holiday movie?
Oh, they were so much fun. Absolutely. One thing I would ask is if we could shoot it around Christmas time. Because we shot Christmas in Tune in the summer, and we were wearing coats and acting like we’re freezing, and everybody was sweating up a storm.
[Actor] John Schneider was your costar in that film. Were you a Dukes of Hazzard fan?
Oh, absolutely. Who wasn’t? John and I even got to perform together in California one year. I’ve known John a long time. We also co-hosted — with Mac Davis — the Academy of Country Music Awards one year.
If you could sing a duet with anyone, living or not, who would it be?
Patsy Cline. I wish I could have met Patsy. She was such a unique character. Everybody that I would work with in the studio or on tours who had gotten to work with Patsy, I’d pick their brain about her, and she was a character.
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