Reba McEntire Remembers Fallen Band Members

March 16, 1991, is a day Reba McEntire will never forget.

 

That day a tragic plane crash took the lives of seven of her band members, her road manager and the plane’s pilot and co-pilot. McEntire is marking 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, 28, keyboardist Joey Cigainero, 27, drummer Tony Saputo, 34, and road manager Jim Hammond. The plan crashed into Otay Mountain, near San Diego.

 

“By far this is my darkest hour, the most awful thing that ever happened in my life,” McEntire 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, McEntire 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 McEntire has sworn to never perform again. The next night the band was scheduled for a show in Fort Wayne, Ind. 

 

McEntire chose to skip the flight because her husband and manager, Narvel Blackstock, urged her to stay and get a good night’s sleep after recovering from bronchitis. Other band members, Joe McGlohon and Pete Finney, took off from the same airfield but in a different plane minutes behind the other jet. At 2:30 a.m., the phone rang in their room. Their pilot broke the tragic news to Blackstock. McEntire and Blackstock 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,” McEntire 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, McEntire decided to make her own phone calls. She went on to call her parents, as well as her 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,” she said.

 

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

 

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