"I might have been as big as Vince (Gill). I don't know," says PAKE McEntire, who quit after his first single peaked at No. 20 on the country charts. "But (the music business) just didn't blow my dress up that much."
KRISTEN LLOYD PHOTOGRAPHY
 

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Reba's brother returns to music after 12-year hiatus
Back in the mid-'80s, the RCA Nashville label was the home for three promising young male artists: Vince Gill, Keith Whitley and PAKE McEntire.
A decade later, none of them were on the label. Gill, after jumping to MCA Records, had become one of country's biggest acts.

The troubled Whitley, on the other hand, had died of alcohol poisoning.

And PAKE McEntire had returned to the life of an Oklahoma rancher, content to let sister Reba be the family's sole country-music star.

"My first record (the rockabilly-flavored single `Every Night') kind of took off a little bit -- it went to No. 20 -- so RCA put me out on the road," said McEntire in a recent telephone interview from his ranch near Kiowa. "Then, when my records started getting not as high on the charts, they let me go.

"Reba tried to get me to go to MCA, like Vince, but I said, `Well, I think I've seen how this thing works, and I don't want to be on the road for another 15 years of my life.'

"I might have been as big as Vince, who hadn't really done anything on RCA. I might not've. I don't know. But it just didn't blow my dress up that much."

Plus, he added, he had "three little ol' girls at home" at the time, and he thought it might be good to watch them grow up.

He did, too. McEntire walked away from the music business, headed back to the wide open spaces of home, and didn't play professionally for the next dozen years.

"I can safely say I didn't do any of it from '87 to '99 -- but it's like riding a bicycle," he noted with a chuckle. "You never forget. And then I started back fiddling, just by myself, in '98. I took a lot of lessons, but about 99 percent of it was just getting in there and takin' hold of it. I've been playing fiddle for about nine years now, and I'm just now coming around, but it's opened up a whole new world of music for me."

A couple of years ago, when his youngest daughter had already begun high school, McEntire got a call from the Duncan-based Ernest Hay, who'd booked him several times during the RCA days.

"He said, `PAKE McEntire, I've had some people ask about you,' " recalled McEntire. "I said, `What'd I do this time?' He said, `No, no, I've got some people who want me to get you to play. Would you do it again?' I said, `Oh, I probably would. Let me think about it and call you back.'

"So I thought about it, and the more I thought about it the more I thought it might be fun. All the pressure was off. I could get a bunch together and play what I wanted to play.

"So we did that, and afterwards Ernest said some other people wanted me to play. So I played a few more times, and shoot -- when I looked up, I had 30 jobs booked for this year."

McEntire's four-man band includes a guitarist who doubles on steel, bassist, drummer and McEntire himself.

"With the fiddle, we can do a lot of instrumentals, like `Orange Blossom Special,' and I try to include a lot of my RCA stuff like `Heart vs. Heart' and `Every Night,' " he said.

"We do stuff from my `Rodeo Man' album, too, which I did in '81, before RCA. I remember being at rodeos and going up in the stands with a box of tapes of that album, just like a hot-dog salesman. I'd come up, introduce myself, and ask if they might want to take a chance on my tape. At one rodeo, in Wheatland, Wyo., I sold 64 tapes.

"You know," he added, "any young artist out there reading this article better understand that they're gonna have to do whatever it takes, as long as it's legal and ethical, to keep it going.

"I heard Randy Travis say on the radio the other day that he's working harder now than he ever has, just trying to stay afloat. They're gonna have to do whatever it takes, and they'd better enjoy every bit of it, too.

"If any of it's work to 'em, they'd better get out now -- and work is what you call it when you'd rather be doing something else."

Meanwhile, McEntire himself seems to be taking his own advice and enjoying his second go-round in the music business -- even more than he did his first.

"This is really fun, and it's not on a demanding level," he explained. "There was a lot of pressure on me then; there's no pressure now. I can stay here on my little ol' ranch, enjoy the Western way of life, go out and play for a couple of days, and then come back and get dirty again."