REBA McENTIRE ALREADY HAD No. 1 HITS — AND STILL DID NOT LIKE THE RECORDS SHE WAS MAKING. SO IN 1984, SHE TOOK CONTROL AND TOLD NASHVILLE EXACTLY WHAT “MY KIND OF COUNTRY” SOUNDED LIKE.
By 1983, Reba McEntire had already spent years trying to become the artist Nashville wanted her to be.
Mercury had signed her in the 1970s, but the climb had been slow. Albums sold modestly. Singles came and went. Producers and executives kept trying different ways to package her voice, as if the right formula might finally unlock the singer inside her.
Eventually, the hits arrived.
“Can’t Even Get the Blues” became her first No. 1 in 1983. “You’re the First Time I’ve Thought About Leaving” followed it to the top. After years of waiting, Reba was finally succeeding on country radio.
But success did not solve the deeper problem.
She still did not feel like she had made the record she actually wanted to make.
The Hits Did Not Feel Like The Whole Answer
That is what makes this chapter different from a simple breakthrough story.
Reba was not failing when she became frustrated. She already had No. 1 records. Country radio had finally accepted her. From the outside, the machinery seemed to be working.
But Reba knew something was missing.
When her Mercury contract ended, she signed with MCA. Her first album there, Just a Little Love, came out in January 1984 and produced another hit. Still, the larger frustration remained. After seven albums, Reba felt she had not yet recorded a project that sounded like the country music she loved deep down.
Not the version built around trend.
Not the version softened for crossover possibility.
Her kind.
That phrase would soon become the whole point.
“That’s Not Country To Me”
The frustration came to a head while Reba was preparing her next album.
She later remembered sitting through songs that were presented to her as country material and feeling the same resistance again and again.
“That’s not country to me,” she would say.
Finally, someone asked the obvious question.
What was country to her?
Reba kept giving the same answer.
“My kind of country.”
The phrase stuck because it was not just a title. It was a line in the sand. For the first time, she was being allowed to answer the question that had followed her through years of slow-building records: what did Reba McEntire actually sound like when she stopped letting other people decide?
This time, she was allowed to choose the songs herself and take meaningful control of her sound.
Harold Shedd produced the album.
But the direction came from Reba.
She Went Backward To Move Forward
Reba did not chase a newer sound to find herself.
She went backward.
She reached for the country music she had grown up loving in Oklahoma — Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Ray Price. Less pop polish. More steel guitar, fiddle, heartbreak, and room for the voice to bend around a lyric.
That choice mattered because it was not nostalgia for decoration.
It was identity.
Reba’s voice had always carried strength, but the right material gave that strength a shape. Traditional country let her sound clearer, sharper, and more emotionally direct. She was no longer being fitted into someone else’s idea of what might sell.
She was choosing songs that told listeners what she believed country music was supposed to do.
On October 15, 1984, MCA released My Kind of Country.
The title sounded almost simple.
The consequences were not.
“How Blue” Proved The Point
The first major payoff was “How Blue.”
It went to No. 1.
Then “Somebody Should Leave” did the same.
Those hits mattered because they proved that Reba’s instincts were not just personal preference. The audience understood exactly what she had been asking for. They heard the steel, the hurt, the clean traditional framing, and the full force of a singer who had finally been given songs strong enough to carry her.
But the bigger change arrived even before the second single had finished its run.
At the 1984 CMA Awards, Reba McEntire was named Female Vocalist of the Year for the first time.
She later remembered the effect as immediate.
Suddenly, people who had only been vaguely aware of her knew exactly who she was.
That is what the right record can do. It does not merely produce hits. It clarifies the person.
The Door Stayed Open
Reba won CMA Female Vocalist of the Year again in 1985.
Then again in 1986.
Then again in 1987.
The woman who had spent nearly a decade moving through different songs, clothes, images, and versions of herself had become the dominant female country vocalist of the middle 1980s.
The records kept growing from there.
“Whoever’s in New England” brought another No. 1 and Reba’s first Grammy. She joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1986. In 1987, she sold out Carnegie Hall in New York.
Those moments did not happen because Nashville finally found a clever way to manufacture Reba McEntire.
They happened because Reba started saying no.
No to songs that did not feel country enough.
No to versions of herself that sounded almost right but not true.
No to a career where success was acceptable even if the music did not feel like home.
What My Kind Of Country Really Leaves Behind
The deepest part of this story is not only that My Kind of Country gave Reba McEntire two No. 1 hits.
It is that Reba had already reached No. 1 before she took control.
Mercury years.
A slow climb.
Two chart-toppers in 1983.
Then MCA, Just a Little Love, more frustration, song meetings, and the sentence that changed everything: “That’s not country to me.”
When asked what country was, she answered with the title of her future.
“My kind of country.”
That answer gave her more than an album.
It gave her an identity strong enough to carry awards, hits, the Opry, Carnegie Hall, and one of the most powerful careers any woman ever built in country music.
Reba McEntire did not become Reba because Nashville finally told her who to be.
She became Reba when she finally told Nashville what she would no longer sing.
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