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AT 60, REBA McENTIRE LOST A 26-YEAR MARRIAGE AND THE TEAM THAT RAN HER CAREER. AT 69, SHE SAID YES AGAIN. When her marriage to Narvel Blackstock ended in 2015, Reba lost more than a husband. Narvel had managed her career for decades, and after the divorce, the people who handled her business stayed on his side of the table. “The divorce was not my idea,” she said. “I didn’t want it in any shape, form or fashion.” For most of her career, her only job had been to walk onstage and sing. Suddenly she was signing the checks, making the calls, and learning how her own company actually worked — by her own account, scared to death the whole time. Here’s the part almost nobody saw coming: the man who would one day propose to her wasn’t a stranger she met after the divorce. He had been in her life since 1991, long before any of it fell apart. It took one phone call, during one of the hardest seasons she ever lived through, to bring him back.

Reba McEntire, Rex Linn, and the Second Chance That Took Years to Bloom

When Reba McEntire’s marriage to Narvel Blackstock ended in 2015, it was not just the end of a long relationship. It was also the end of a professional system she had depended on for years. Narvel Blackstock had managed Reba McEntire’s career for decades, and after the divorce, Reba McEntire had to step into parts of the business life she had never fully owned herself. By her own account, that shift was frightening. She has said the divorce was not her idea, and that she did not want it in any shape, form, or fashion.

For someone whose job had long been to sing, perform, and trust the people behind the curtain, that change was enormous. Suddenly, Reba McEntire was dealing with decisions that used to happen around her. She was learning how her company worked, making calls, and signing checks. It was a hard season, but it also became a turning point. Reba McEntire had to rebuild more than a personal life; she had to rebuild confidence in her own voice offstage, too.

What makes the story even more surprising is that the man who would later become her fiancé was not new to Reba McEntire at all. Rex Linn entered her life years earlier, and the two first met in 1991 on the set of The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw. For decades, their paths crossed in the way busy careers sometimes allow: briefly, warmly, and without a public love story attached to them.

Then came 2020. During a difficult period, including Reba McEntire’s worry over her mother’s illness, Rex Linn reached out. The pandemic kept them apart, but it also gave their connection room to grow the old-fashioned way: through phone calls, texts, and long conversations. What started as support slowly deepened into something neither of them seemed to rush. By June 2020, they had seen each other again in person.

Years later, on Christmas Eve 2024, Rex Linn proposed at a Tennessee ranch. The ring was custom-made in Austin, Texas, with a rose gold band and a black diamond, chosen because Rex Linn knew Reba McEntire was not drawn to traditional diamonds. Reba McEntire said yes at 69, and the moment felt less like a sudden twist than the quiet completion of a story that had been waiting in the background for decades.

“Work comes first,” Rex Linn has said of their busy lives, while Reba McEntire has said she feels like a teenager again.

As of mid-2026, Reba McEntire and Rex Linn are still engaged, still balancing filming, music, and life together. They have not set a wedding date yet, but that does not seem to trouble them. If anything, the delay fits the relationship itself: steady, patient, and unhurried. For Reba McEntire, the biggest love story may be the one that arrived after loss, after fear, and after learning how to stand on her own again.

 

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GEORGE JONES WOKE FROM A COMA ASKING FOR ONE WOMAN. IT TURNED OUT SHE’D BEEN ON HER KNEES PRAYING FOR HIM AT THAT EXACT MOMENT. March 6, 1999. Highway 96, near Franklin, Tennessee. The man country fans had called “No Show Jones” for two decades — the drunk, the brawler, the husband Tammy Wynette walked away from in 1975 — was on the phone with his stepdaughter when he lost control. His Lexus left the road and slammed head-on into a concrete bridge. She heard the whole crash through the receiver. No seatbelt. Collapsed lung. Ruptured liver. It took a rescue crew more than two hours to cut him out of the wreckage. On the helicopter to Vanderbilt, his heart stopped twice. A doctor pulled Nancy — his fourth wife — aside and told her, “He’s not going to make it.” But it wasn’t his time. As Jones started to come out of it, he wasn’t cursing and he wasn’t asking for a drink. He was singing gospel songs. And he was asking for one person: Vestal Goodman, a gospel singer he’d only met months before. Here’s what he didn’t know while he lay unconscious — Vestal had been praying for him the whole time. Jones told the story himself years later: “I didn’t have her on my mind at all. All of a sudden, when I started coming out of the coma, my wife said I started singing gospel songs and wanting to see Vestal. Come to find out, she’d been praying. I wanted some gospel music, and my whole life changed.” He never touched another drop. Never lit another cigarette. Friends said the hell-raiser they’d known for forty years was just… gone. Fourteen more years. And in May 1999 he released “Choices” — a song about the roads a man takes and the price he pays, sung like a confession by the one man who’d lived every word. It won him a Grammy. He’d had the talent, the fame, the applause. In the end, he admitted none of it had saved him.

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THAT TYPEWRITER SOUND IN “9 TO 5” ISN’T A TYPEWRITER AT ALL — IT’S DOLLY PARTON’S FINGERNAILS. She was filming her first movie, and she’d taken the role on one condition: she got to write the theme song. She didn’t want to keep leaving the set for her guitar, so between takes she’d click her long acrylic nails together, building a rhythm that sounded just like the clatter of a busy office. At night she carried it back to her hotel and finished the words on guitar. The song was about real women in the workplace, underpaid and overlooked, and Dolly wanted it fun enough to sing along to but honest enough to feel like their own. When it came time to record, that nail sound made the final cut. Look at the album credits and there it is, in black and white: “Nails by Dolly.” The song went to No. 1 on Billboard’s country, pop, and adult contemporary charts, won two Grammys, and earned an Oscar nod. All of it built on a rhythm she tapped out with the tips of her fingers.

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THEY CALLED HIM “NO SHOW JONES” FOR YEARS — THE MAN WHO MISSED CONCERTS, WHO LET THE BOTTLE WIN. SO IN HIS FINAL MONTHS, DYING, GEORGE JONES REFUSED TO MISS A SINGLE ONE. On April 6, 2013, at the Knoxville Coliseum, he was 81 and could barely breathe. His doctors had begged him to come off the road. His wife Nancy begged too. But he wouldn’t stop. “I think of all those old mamas who saved their money for me,” he told her, “and I was a no-show.” That night he lowered every key. He sat in a chair to sing. And when it came time for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — the greatest country song ever written — he forced himself to stand. Two minutes in, his body gave out and he sat back down. But he finished it. He gave them all of it. Backstage, he turned to Nancy and said, “I just did my last show. And I gave ’em hell.” The next morning he entered the hospital. He never came home. Twenty days later, on April 26, he was gone. He spent a lifetime running from his fans. He spent his last breath proving he loved them. What do you think — is that how a legend should go out?

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GEORGE JONES WOKE FROM A COMA ASKING FOR ONE WOMAN. IT TURNED OUT SHE’D BEEN ON HER KNEES PRAYING FOR HIM AT THAT EXACT MOMENT. March 6, 1999. Highway 96, near Franklin, Tennessee. The man country fans had called “No Show Jones” for two decades — the drunk, the brawler, the husband Tammy Wynette walked away from in 1975 — was on the phone with his stepdaughter when he lost control. His Lexus left the road and slammed head-on into a concrete bridge. She heard the whole crash through the receiver. No seatbelt. Collapsed lung. Ruptured liver. It took a rescue crew more than two hours to cut him out of the wreckage. On the helicopter to Vanderbilt, his heart stopped twice. A doctor pulled Nancy — his fourth wife — aside and told her, “He’s not going to make it.” But it wasn’t his time. As Jones started to come out of it, he wasn’t cursing and he wasn’t asking for a drink. He was singing gospel songs. And he was asking for one person: Vestal Goodman, a gospel singer he’d only met months before. Here’s what he didn’t know while he lay unconscious — Vestal had been praying for him the whole time. Jones told the story himself years later: “I didn’t have her on my mind at all. All of a sudden, when I started coming out of the coma, my wife said I started singing gospel songs and wanting to see Vestal. Come to find out, she’d been praying. I wanted some gospel music, and my whole life changed.” He never touched another drop. Never lit another cigarette. Friends said the hell-raiser they’d known for forty years was just… gone. Fourteen more years. And in May 1999 he released “Choices” — a song about the roads a man takes and the price he pays, sung like a confession by the one man who’d lived every word. It won him a Grammy. He’d had the talent, the fame, the applause. In the end, he admitted none of it had saved him.

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THAT TYPEWRITER SOUND IN “9 TO 5” ISN’T A TYPEWRITER AT ALL — IT’S DOLLY PARTON’S FINGERNAILS. She was filming her first movie, and she’d taken the role on one condition: she got to write the theme song. She didn’t want to keep leaving the set for her guitar, so between takes she’d click her long acrylic nails together, building a rhythm that sounded just like the clatter of a busy office. At night she carried it back to her hotel and finished the words on guitar. The song was about real women in the workplace, underpaid and overlooked, and Dolly wanted it fun enough to sing along to but honest enough to feel like their own. When it came time to record, that nail sound made the final cut. Look at the album credits and there it is, in black and white: “Nails by Dolly.” The song went to No. 1 on Billboard’s country, pop, and adult contemporary charts, won two Grammys, and earned an Oscar nod. All of it built on a rhythm she tapped out with the tips of her fingers.

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THEY CALLED HIM “NO SHOW JONES” FOR YEARS — THE MAN WHO MISSED CONCERTS, WHO LET THE BOTTLE WIN. SO IN HIS FINAL MONTHS, DYING, GEORGE JONES REFUSED TO MISS A SINGLE ONE. On April 6, 2013, at the Knoxville Coliseum, he was 81 and could barely breathe. His doctors had begged him to come off the road. His wife Nancy begged too. But he wouldn’t stop. “I think of all those old mamas who saved their money for me,” he told her, “and I was a no-show.” That night he lowered every key. He sat in a chair to sing. And when it came time for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — the greatest country song ever written — he forced himself to stand. Two minutes in, his body gave out and he sat back down. But he finished it. He gave them all of it. Backstage, he turned to Nancy and said, “I just did my last show. And I gave ’em hell.” The next morning he entered the hospital. He never came home. Twenty days later, on April 26, he was gone. He spent a lifetime running from his fans. He spent his last breath proving he loved them. What do you think — is that how a legend should go out?

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DOLLY PARTON LOOKED LAINEY WILSON IN THE EYES AND SANG “AND I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU” RIGHT BACK TO HER. To understand what that moment meant, you have to know how these two women met. May 2023, the ACM Awards. Dolly was on stage reading the winner of Female Artist of the Year, and the name she read was Lainey’s. It was the first time Lainey had ever met the woman she’d idolized her whole life — and it happened in front of the entire country music world. Six months later, Lainey stood at the CMAs with nine nominations and left with five trophies, including Entertainer of the Year, making her the first woman to claim country music’s highest honor since Taylor Swift in 2011. After twelve and a half years of grinding in Nashville, she said it finally felt like country music was starting to love her back. Then, in February 2024, Dolly invited her to share a stage in Nashville. Lainey sang the first verse of the song Dolly wrote back in the 1970s, and Dolly’s harmony came in on the chorus — a moment Lainey says she will never forget. One legend welcomed her before the biggest win of her career. Then she handed her the most sacred song she ever wrote. That’s not passing a torch. That’s two generations holding it together.