It happened nearly 35 years ago, but Reba McEntire has never forgotten that night.
"I got booed off the stage at Cowtown Pickin' Party in Fort Worth in 1978," she recalls. "It was a tough crowd."
McEntire was the opening act for John Conlee, the band backing her didn't know any of her songs, and she resorted to telling jokes to fill some of her allotted time onstage.
"Then I walked off the stage and somebody from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram interviewed me and asked if I'm going to quit the music business," she says. "I said, 'No, I'm not going to quit. I'm going to regroup, take my marbles and go somewhere else.'"
McEntire went on to become the Queen of Country Music, selling more than 60 million records.
"I never worry that I might be a failure or a flop," she says. "I never look at anything that way."
That's why she has high expectations for her new sitcom, Malibu Country, which premieres Friday on ABC after the return of Tim Allen's Last Man Standing.
"The sky's the limit when you're doing these things," the funny redhead says. "I say dream big. I'd love to go seven or eight seasons with this show. Ten would be great!"
It would be unwise to bet against her.
When McEntire launched her previous sitcom, Reba, in 2001, few TV critics predicted success. But the durable little comedy thrived for six long seasons.
In the new show, Reba plays a wife and mother of two whose life is turned upside-down when she discovers that her country music legend husband has a cheatin' heart. She divorces him and leaves Nashville with her kids and her crazy mom (played by Lily Tomlin) to start anew in sunny California.
Once the family arrives in Malibu, they experience 100,000 volts of culture shock.
McEntire knows that feeling only too well.
Even though she came from a country music showbiz world, when she and her manager-husband, Narvel Blackstock, moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles to make Reba, they sometimes felt like they had stepped onto the surface of an alien planet.
People just do things differently in La La Land. It's a place where flaky, self-involved behavior seems to be the norm, not the exception.
Meanwhile, Reba's son Shelby, 11 at the time, absolutely hated California.
"He was praying heavily that the show would get canceled so we could move back," McEntire says. "So a lot of the things we were dealing with then in real life are happening now in the show."
That said, Malibu Country was not inspired by McEntire's experiences in L.A. a decade ago. Not even close.
In fact, the show was created by Dave Stewart, of the 1980s pop-rock duo the Eurythmics, and he didn't have McEntire in mind at all.
Reba McEntire and the Eurythmics don't exactly travel in the same circles, after all.
But it so happens that Reba's stepson, music manager Brandon Blackstock, was on a plane flying from Nashville to L.A. when he got to talking to Stewart, a fellow passenger.
"Dave mentioned that he had a concept for a sitcom called Malibu Country," McEntire says. "And Brandon says, 'Well, I know Reba McEntire. Why don't I send it to her?'
"So he sent it to me, and I liked it immediately. It wasn't created for me, but Brandon happened to be there at the right place at the time to get it to me, and it was a perfect fit."
Still, one has to wonder: What might have happened with Malibu Country had Stewart been on that plane seated next to Faith Hill's manager or Shania Twain's publicist?
McEntire loves being back on television in the old-school, filmed-in-front-of-a-studio-audience sitcom format.
"I like everything about it," she says. "I love the energy that the audience brings to the room. And I love the challenge of making a new show every week. Every day we get some version of a new script. It might be a few pages that are different, it might be a bunch of pages.
"After all those seasons of Reba, I never got tired of doing this."
