Reba McEntire: Have I Got A Deal For You : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Success seems to agree with Reba McEntire. Last fall's neotraditional My Kind of Country, produced by Harold Shedd, yielded two Number One country singles ("How Blue" and "Somebody Should Leave"), transformed McEntire from a cult favorite into the Country Music Association's Female Vocalist of the Year and gave her enough clout to coproduce this time around. The result is a record at least as country as the last, with sweet-and-sour overdubbed harmonies that evoke Tammy Wynette's first hits, the slippery, soaring steel guitar of Nashville super-sideman Weldon Myrick and the jazzy, mercurial fiddling of Bob Wills veteran Johnny Gimble. And McEntire's singing, full of the sassy self-confidence the title suggests, is even more daring and expressive.

McEntire has one of the great country voices – the passion of Molly O'Day, the agility and control of Dolly Parton and an accent more unabashedly Southern than Loretta Lynn's. On the fun songs she flirts and kids but never loses her cool, and on the weepers she can take you right over the edge. About the only thing wrong with Have I Got a Deal for You is that it doesn't have a tearjerker as ruthlessly effective as "Somebody Should Leave," on My Kind of Country, or "There Ain't No Future in This," available on The Best of Reba McEntire, a new compilation of songs she recorded for Mercury/Polygram between 1980 and 1983.

Have I Got a Deal for You offers more wholesome pleasures. There's a hopped-up country rocker ("I'm in Love All Over"), the now-obligatory bit of re-created Western Swing ("I Don't Need Nothin' You Ain't Got") and a simple and touching I'll-still-be-around song in the folky manner of the early Dolly Parton ("Don't Forget Your Way Home"). There are also three instant country classics, all taken at loping medium tempos: "Whose Heartache Is This Anyway," "She's Single Again" and the endearingly swaggering title song, which comically overextends the metaphor of the heart as used merchandise ("I'll let it go so cheap you'll think you stole it 'fore you're through"). McEntire is at her best on these songs and on "Only in My Mind," her first noncollaborative songwriting effort on record. It's a noncheater's cheating song, a tense dialogue between husband and wife ("He said, 'Have you ever cheated on me?'/And I said, 'Only in my mind' "), as told to the man with whom she refrains from cheating. The melodic hook shows too palpably the influence of George Jones' classic "A Good Year for the Roses," but the drama is expertly cranked up. For McEntire the songwriter, Have I Got a Deal for You is a tentative but promising debut; for McEntire the producer, it's evidence she can take care of herself. For McEntire the singer, who has a lot less to prove, it's business as usual and then some.