The Hymns That Live in Me

Songs of hope and faith have been a part of my life ever since my girlhood days in a one-room church in Chockie, Oklahoma

- Reba McEntire

THE FIRST SONG I EVER SANG in front of an audience was a hymn. I was four or five years old, and our family was staying at the Frontier Hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the Frontier Days Rodeo. Daddy had won the steer-roping event there twice in previous years—just like his daddy had done a couple of decades earlier at the same venue—and he was competing again. In between performances, when we weren’t at the rodeo arena, the cowboys and their families would hang out in the lobby of the hotel to visit and pass the time.

One afternoon my older brother, Pake, stood in front of a group of the cowboys, who had talked him into singing them a song. He launched into Elvis’s “Hound Dog” (minus the hip swiveling). To my amazement, Everett Shaw, one of the rodeo champions, fished a quarter out of his jeans and gave it to Pake.

“I want a quarter too,” I told my brother. But what would I sing for the folks?

“Well, you know ‘Jesus Loves Me,’ don’t you?” Pake said. “Sing that.”

So I sauntered to the center of the lobby while Pake got everybody quiet, and I sang in my best Sunday-school voice, “Jesus loves me, this I know.…” At the end, everybody clapped.

Somebody did press a coin in my hand, but it was only a nickel. No matter. I was officially a singer, and as my family will tell you, it’s been hard to get me to stop singing. I love singing, love making music with others, love working on a song in my head and then sharing it. But I especially love how songs of faith, new ones and old, keep me connected to God.