At sixty years old, Reba McEntire faced the most frightening moment of her life, not on a stage but in an empty executive office. The husband she had loved for twenty-six years was gone, and so was the manager who had run every part of her career. The company they had built together still stood on Music Row, but the desk at the top of it was suddenly hers alone.
She had not arrived there by accident. On June 3, 1989, she married her steel guitar player and tour manager Narvel Blackstock on a boat at Lake Tahoe. Blackstock had joined her road band back in 1980, hauling gear and playing steel guitar night after night on long tours. After her 1987 divorce from rodeo champion Charlie Battles, he stepped into her management, and together they took control of her future.
In 1988, the couple founded Starstruck Entertainment, bringing her touring, bookings, and financial operations under their own roof instead of handing percentages to outside agencies. The division of work inside their marriage soon became clear. McEntire poured everything into recording and performing, while Blackstock handled contracts, investments, and day-to-day corporate growth.
By the mid-1990s, their venture had outgrown a typical management office. They built a striking glass-and-granite headquarters at 40 Music Square West on Nashville’s Music Row, a building anchored by two recording studios and executive suites. From that base, Starstruck grew far beyond concert tours into music publishing, construction, trucking, and book publishing, alongside a thoroughbred horse farm and a private jet charter service.
As an artist management powerhouse, Starstruck also guided other major acts, eventually representing Blake Shelton and Kelly Clarkson. At the same time, Blackstock helped steer McEntire beyond country radio into film roles, her acclaimed 2001 Broadway run in Annie Get Your Gun, her six-season television sitcom Reba, and a longtime Dillard’s lifestyle line of clothing, footwear, and home goods.
For twenty-six years of marriage and thirty-five years of working side by side, McEntire trusted that structure completely. She later told Esquire that everyone around her handled the logistics and finances so all she had to do was get up and sing.
Everyone around me handled the logistics and the finances so all I had to do was get up and sing.
Even on vacations meant for rest, she recalled that within three days the two of them would start mapping out their next business project. That rhythm ended abruptly in 2015 when the couple separated and finalized their divorce that October, an outcome McEntire publicly admitted she had not wanted.
When the marriage ended, much of her management infrastructure stayed with Blackstock at Starstruck. At age sixty, she lost both her husband and her longtime manager at once, and she admitted she felt terrified as she faced the business side of her life alone.
I felt scared to death facing the business side of my life alone.
Rather than slowing down or handing her career to another large corporate firm, McEntire stepped out of Starstruck Entertainment in early 2016 and launched her own company, Reba’s Business, Inc. She recruited former Starstruck marketing vice president Justin McIntosh and longtime assistant Leslie Matthews to help run her daily operations while she took the lead seat at the table herself.
For the first time in decades, she sat in the strategy meetings, reviewed her own budgets, and learned the everyday costs and contract details she had once left entirely to Blackstock. Close friends encouraged her through the transition, reminding her that even if she had not known how much a gallon of milk cost before, she was tough enough to learn the ropes on her own.
Managing her own enterprise in her sixties, she went on to win her third Grammy Award for the 2017 gospel album Sing It Now Songs of Faith and Hope, opened her three-story restaurant Reba’s Place in Atoka, Oklahoma, joined The Voice as a coach, and returned to network sitcom television in Happy’s Place.
Even after parting ways with the Music Row building they built together, McEntire continued to credit the decades she and Blackstock spent creating Starstruck, while proving past age sixty that she could sit at the head of her own table.