True friends are hard to come by. On March 16th, 1991 seven of Reba’s band members, as well as her tour manager, were tragically killed in a plane crash flying from a show near San Diego, California. They had performed for a group of IBM executives, and had planned to go straight from there to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her tour manager Jim Hammon, keyboardist and bandleader Kirk Cappello, fellow keyboardist Joey Cigainero, drummer Tony Saputo, guitarists Michael Thomas and Chris Austin, bassist Terry Jackson and backup singer Paula Kaye Evans, as well as the two pilots, Donald Holmes and Christopher Hollinger, were all killed that day. Reba almost ended up on the plane, as well, but had decided last minute to stay the night in San Diego because she was still dealing with a bout of bronchitis. Her then-husband, Narvel Blackstock, and stylist, Sandy Spika, stayed the night with her. The rest of her crew left in two separate planes from a private airport, but the first of the two that took off crashed just 10 minutes from the airport. The tragic incident led her to write an album, For My Broken Heart, dedicated to her beloved band and crew members, which she added in the liner notes was: “A form of healing for all our broken hearts.” In her 1994 autobiography Reba: My Story, she says that she was jolted awake at 2AM by her hotel phone ringing. At first, she thought an excited fan had gotten the number to her room, or that someone possibly had the wrong number. But it was Roger Woolsey on the other line, Reba’s pilot, who wanted Narvel to come up to his room immediately. Roger quickly got dressed to go up there, and he couldn’t even answer any of Reba’s questions about what was going on as he hurried up to get more details. She recounted some of the details from that night in her book: “I sat upright in bed. I wouldn’t lie down again until the next night at my home in Tennessee. Later, Narvel would describe Roger as being white as a sheet when he walked into his room. ‘I watched everybody get on both planes,’ Roger said to Narvel. ‘Both planes taxied to the end of the runway and I got in my car to come back to the hotel.’” Ultimately, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reported that Holmes, the main pilot, had called an FAA service specialist to find out how long he needed to wait to take off. He was told he could take off immediately if he used if he used “visual flight rules,” which means he was required to know the area and terrain. He called back two more times before they took off, but mainly because he wanted to confirm he wouldn’t cross into the complex map of controlled air space in the region. According to Biography.com, he was told it was fine to direct the plane northeast and remain below 3,000 feet. A few minutes after takeoff, around 1:45AM, they were flying at 3,300 feet when the left wing clipped an outcropping of 3,500-foot Otay Mountain, sending it into the rocky peak with a massive explosion. It was an awful tragedy that still deeply affects Reba to this day, and shortly after the crash, Reba would go on to win ACM Female Vocalist of the Year in 1991, and she dedicated that win to her band: It was an extremely traumatic situation, obviously, and though Reba went onto have a legendary career, two of Reba’s closest friends in the music industry stepped up when she needed them the most to In a new interview with Garden & Gun, Reba talked about how much two artists in particular stepped up, and that would be Dolly Parton and Vince Gill. Reba has previously explained how Dolly called her right after the crash to offer comfort, and also offered to let Reba use her band and do anything else she needed to try to keep her career obligations going as best as she could during that awful time. She explained how hard it obviously was to get back onstage after that, but the support of those two meant everything: “It was really hard for me to get back onstage, but Vince Gill called and said, ‘Buddy, I’ll be there for you. Here, take my band.’ It was such a gift to see how many people stepped forward to help, and to reassure, because so many of us had hearts that were broken.” I can’t even imagine how hard that time was, but Reba showed incredible strength and resilience, which has served her well in so many aspects of her life, including her divorce from her longtime husband Narvel Blackstock. They divorced in 2015 after 26 years of marriage, and Reba says she prayed about it and knew she had to keep moving forward: “You have to look at it as something that has happened—now, how are you going to deal with it? I was out walking one time when one of these situations happened in my life. I said, ‘Lord, what am I going to do? What do I say?’ And it came to me. It said, ‘Oh, well. There’s nothing you can do about it.’ You might as well move forward, and find something to occupy your time. Go work, go do something else.” Reba has always had incredible confidence about her in order to handle these very hard and heartbreaking situations, and she attributes that to the encouragement, and sometimes tough love, of her mother: “I wouldn’t say I’m cocky, but I’m confident. Mama always said, ‘You can do anything you set your mind to.’ I’d be like, ‘Ugh, I have to drive to Dallas, and that’s two and a half hours, and it’s snowing…’ And I’d just dread it. Mama would say, ‘Reba, you can do anything for twenty-four hours. You said you would do it, so get down there, do the best you can, and get back home. Put your big-girl panties on.'” That advice has served her well of the years, clearly, and Reba is continuing her legendary country career with an NBC sitcom called Happy’s Place, in addition to continuing her work as a judge on The Voice, and of course, in her personal life, wedding bells are ringing as she got engaged to actor Rex Linn in 2024. Notably, her single “Trailblazer” with Lainey Wilson and Miranda Lambert became her highest streaming debut, so she shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon and I have a feeling this might be one of her best years yet, as she continues to prove that age is just a number and good country music is truly timeless. “Trailblazer” The post “It Was Really Hard To Get Back Onstage”: Reba Names The Two Country Legends Who Pulled Her Through The 1991 Plane Crash Tragedy first appeared on Whiskey Riff.