In 2014, Reba McEntire heard a ballad called “Just Like Them Horses” and knew at once where it belonged. Not on the radio, and not on her next album. She wanted it played at her father’s funeral. Clark McEntire was still alive when she made that decision, and she planned to record the song with nothing more than a piano and her own voice, just for the family.
The cowboy she was saying goodbye to
Clark Vincent McEntire was born on November 30, 1927, in Graham, Oklahoma, the son of a steer roper. At 19 he came home a local hero after winning the all-around title at the 1947 Pendleton Round-Up. He went on to win world championships in steer roping in 1957, 1958 and 1961, and was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 1979, the same year Reba released “Daddy,” a song she wrote for him.
He married Jacqueline Smith in 1950. They raised four children, Alice, Pake, Reba and Susie, on a ranch near Chockie, and stayed married for 64 years.
In 2011, around the time Reba was entering the Country Music Hall of Fame, Clark suffered a stroke. His hospital stay was so long and so uncertain that the family planned his funeral three separate times before he pulled through. He lived roughly three more years, but the family understood his time was short.
A CD in the pile
In 2014, Reba was listening through stacks of songs for a new album, the record that became Love Somebody. Songwriter Liz Hengber sent her a CD of “Just Like Them Horses.” Hengber had started writing it for a friend who was dying of cancer, and when she could not finish it, she brought in Tommy Lee James to help.
Reba later said she knew the minute she heard it that she wanted it played at Daddy’s funeral. The song is a quiet goodbye between someone who is leaving and someone who has to let them go, and it is built around the image of a gate opening and horses running free. For a family whose life was horses, cattle and rodeo, it fit almost too well. The recording even names Chockie Mountain, the hill country Reba grew up in.
Just a piano and a voice
Her plan was modest. She suggested a simple piano-and-vocal arrangement, something the family could play at the service. It was never meant to be on her record.
Producer Tony Brown heard it and saw it differently. He told her she needed to cut it for the album, and he insisted on it. Reba agreed, and she is credited as co-producer on the finished track alongside him.
The track still opens on a gentle piano before fiddle comes in and the arrangement slowly swells, and reviewers singled out the fragile edge in Reba’s voice near the end.
October 2014
The timing left almost no room. Reba told Taste of Country that her father died not long after they recorded it.
Clark McEntire died on the night of Thursday, October 23, 2014, in a nursing home in Coalgate, Oklahoma. He was 86. The next morning Reba shared the news with a photo of him on horseback in a white cowboy hat. She wrote that he had always told his children never to run a horse to the barn, and that he had simply been taking his time going home.
His funeral was held on Wednesday, October 29, in the Kiowa High School auditorium, and he was buried in Green Meadows Cemetery in Atoka. The song chosen for that day was part of the service. Early reports, and the album’s liner notes, said Reba sang it there. In 2016, speaking on the family land, she corrected herself in the same breath: they had played the record.
From funeral song to album track
Love Somebody was released on April 14, 2015, and debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country albums chart, her twelfth album to top it. In the liner notes, Reba dedicated “Just Like Them Horses” to her parents.
A video on the homeplace
On January 19, 2016, the song went out as the album’s third single, along with a black-and-white video Reba co-directed with Justin McIntosh. It was shot entirely on the McEntire homeplace in Chockie, where she lived for 21 years. The clip opens with her voice asking how you say goodbye to someone who made you, raised you and loved you.
Rain slowed the shoot, but a drone captured horses running through the pastures on the part of the property that belongs to her sister Susie and Susie’s husband, Mark. Reba admitted she got choked up watching the footage.
Her mother, Jacqueline, appears in the video, driving a truck across the land to meet her daughter. Reba described her as the partner, bookkeeper, hired hand and cook who held the ranch and the family together.
“Mama had to be in the video.”
In her letter for the release, Reba remembered how much her father traveled, between rodeos, cattle buying and the trips she took him on to Europe and Australia. On one of them, he told her that if he ever got home, he would not go past the mailbox again.
The single peaked at No. 37 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. Reba called the video the most meaningful one she had ever made.
The line she kept
Asked for her favorite line, Reba pointed to the one about it being time to run, and said her father did exactly that.
“He ran all the way to heaven. Just like them horses.”
Jacqueline McEntire died on March 14, 2020, at 93. The video remains the place where Reba and her mother stood together on the land Clark built, watching the horses run.