Reba remembers fallen band mates

March 16, 1991 was a tragic day for Reba McEntire, as well as several others. It marks the day in history that a plane crashed and took the lives of seven of her band members, her road manager, as well as the plane’s pilot and co-pilot. This year, she marked the 20th anniversary by posting a special memoriam tribute on her website.

The lives lost that day were those of guitarist Chris Austin, 27, backup singer Paula Kaye Evans, 33, bassist Terry Jackson, 28, guitarist Michael Thomas, 34, bandleader Kirk Cappello, keyboardist Joey Cigainero, 27, drummer Tony Saputo, 34, and road manager Jim Hammond. The plan crashed into Otay Mountain, close to the San Diego area.

“By far this is my darkest hour, the most awful thing that ever happened in my life,” Reba said to People magazine, only days after the accident. “When you have eight people that you absolutely love and their lives are just wiped out – it’s devastating.”

Four hours prior to the accent, Reba and her band mates performed a 75-minute set at a IBM convention at San Diego’s Sheraton Harbor Island Hotel. One of the last songs the band performed was “Sweet Dreams,” by Patsy Cline, which Reba has sworn to never perform again. The next night, they were scheduled for a show in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Reba chose to skip the flight due to the fact that her husband and manager, Narvel Blackstock, urged her to stay and get a good night’s sleep because she was recovering from bronchitis. Other band members, Joe McGlohon and Pete Finney, took off from the same airfield, only in a different plane, simply minutes behind the other jet. At 2:30 a.m., the phone rang in Reba and Narvel’s room. Their pilot asked Narvel to go to his room, where he was then told the plane had crashed. Reba and Narvel were then faced with the difficult task of calling loved ones and spreading the news.

“The hardest hours was listening to Narvel having to make the phone calls. That was the worst part,” Reba said to American Country Countdown With Kix Brooks. “I was so numb, I would follow Narvel from room to room, and he finally looked around at me, and said ‘You’ve got to stop following me!’ He said ‘I’ve got to hold it together to tell these people what happened.’ He said ‘You can’t follow me crying like this.’ I needed him to, but he couldn’t. He had to console and to tell these other people.”

At that point, Reba decided to make her phone calls. She went on to call her parents, as well as friend Barbara Mandrell to share the recent event. “About all I could do, I called momma and daddy to let ‘em know… and then I called Barbara Mandrell because Kirk Cappello had worked for her before me, and I wanted her to hear it from me, because Narvel was calling everybody else. That by far was the hardest night of my life, and the rest to come with the memorial service and then after that, realizing that they weren’t going to be there when I turned around onstage.”

Reba then went on to cancel all appearances through April, except for her performance at the Academy Awards, nine days after the crash. She had wanted to cancel everything through July, but Debbie Hammon, wife of Jim, would not allow it. At the Oscars that year, Reba performed the Oscar-nominated song, “I’m Checkin’ Out,” the song Meryl Streep Sang at the end of “Postcards from the Edge.’

“I know in my heart they did go to a better place, and they told me at my vanity… one morning – I was supposed to do the Oscars, and I was supposed to sing “Heartbreak Hotel,” Postcards From the Edge, “I’m Checking Out (of this Heartbreak Hotel) “ – and I sat at my vanity, and I had to give an answer that afternoon,” Reba said. “And it just came to me, and there was Jim and all the guys and Paula Kaye saying ‘Go do it for us – I’m checking out of this Heartbreak Hotel.”

Her next album, “For My Broken Heart” was dedicated to her lost loved ones, which was a collection of songs about heartbreak and loneliness.