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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In October 2026, a little more than a year after losing her stepson Brandon Blackstock, Reba McEntire held her newborn grandson Archie for the first time. The arrival of the baby boy followed five difficult years for the 71-year-old country singer. In March 2020, Reba lost her mother, Jacqueline McEntire, to cancer at age 93. Then in August 2025, the family faced another heavy blow when Brandon passed away at age 48 after a three-year battle with melanoma. Even though Reba and Brandon’s father had divorced in 2015, that separation never changed how she viewed the children she had helped raise for nearly three decades. She always considered Brandon her son, and watching him lose his life so young was a loss she carried closely alongside her youngest son, Shelby Blackstock. Fourteen months after saying goodbye to Brandon, Shelby and his wife, Marissa Branch, brought new life into the family when their son Archie was born in October 2026. The birth made Shelby a father for the first time and gave Reba her first biological grandchild. For a mother who had spent the past few years comforting her family through illness and funerals, cradling a newborn in her arms brought a quiet sense of relief. Beside her, Shelby had gone from grieving his older brother to holding a baby boy of his own. Nothing replaces the people a family loses along the way, and the memories of Jacqueline and Brandon remain part of their everyday lives. Still, as Reba steps into her seventies, Archie’s arrival has filled the family home with the sound of a new generation beginning.

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When Reba McEntire held her newborn grandson, Shelby Archer McEntire Blackstock, for the first time in October 2026, the arrival closed a heavy six-year stretch of family loss that included the death of her mother in 2020 and the passing of her oldest son, Brandon Blackstock, fourteen months earlier.

Introduced to the public on October 21 by McEntire’s 36-year-old son, Shelby Blackstock, and his wife, Marissa Branch, the baby boy is called Archie to distinguish him from his father. His birth made Shelby a first-time parent and gave the 71-year-old country singer her first biological grandchild.

That autumn milestone arrived after a string of painful goodbyes that began on March 14, 2020, when McEntire’s mother, Jacqueline Smith McEntire, died of bladder cancer at age 93. After burying her mother in Oklahoma just as the pandemic shut down her concert calendar, McEntire leaned on her sister Susie, her boyfriend Rex Linn, and her children in Tennessee to get through the quiet months off the road.

Among those children were Brandon, Chassidy, and Shawna, the three older kids she had helped raise since marrying her former husband and manager, Narvel Blackstock, in 1989. Even after she and Narvel divorced in 2015 following 26 years of marriage, McEntire refused to use the word stepchildren, telling interviewers plainly that she claimed all of them as her own.

Behind the scenes, the family was soon rallying around Brandon, a longtime music manager who had guided the careers of Blake Shelton and Rascal Flatts before stepping back to ranch in Montana. For more than three years, he fought a private battle with melanoma away from public headlines.

During that same stretch, Shelby and Marissa, who had married at Walt Disney World in February 2022, were navigating their own quiet struggle to start a family. After three years of infertility and a first round of IVF, the couple saw a positive pregnancy test on Thanksgiving morning, the day after Marissa’s father passed away, only to lose the baby in December.

Eight months later, on August 7, 2025, Brandon died surrounded by family at age 48, leaving behind four children, Savannah, Seth, River, and Remington, along with his young grandchildren.

Six days after his death, McEntire shared old snapshots of the two of them fishing and working on her farm. Calling Brandon her stepson and oldest son, she wrote that his struggle was finally over and closed her message with the words, “Rest in peace cowboy. Happy trails to you til we meet again.”

For Shelby, losing the older brother who had helped raise him left a daily ache. While preparing for a second round of IVF with Marissa, he credited Brandon with giving him the childhood confidence to believe he could accomplish anything.

Hope returned in April 2026 when Shelby and Marissa announced that their second IVF cycle had succeeded and a baby boy was due in October.

As the due date approached on August 7, 2026, the first anniversary of Brandon’s death, Shelby posted childhood photos of the two brothers together. He wrote that he wished Brandon could have met Archer in person, adding that he planned to pass along everything his older brother had taught him, even if he still could not out-hunt him yet.

Two months later, Archie arrived, spending part of his first week sleeping under a blue hospital light with a pacifier before coming home healthy with his parents.

Holding the infant in October brought relief to a grandmother who had spent the previous six years walking her family through cancer wards, miscarriages, and funerals. Fourteen months after saying goodbye to the older brother who helped shape him, Shelby stood beside his mother with a son of his own in his arms.

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In 1974, the Bee Gees spent a full week singing at the Batley Variety Club in West Yorkshire while audience members ate fried chicken from wicker baskets at their tables. After the commercial failure of their albums “Life in a Tin Can” and “Mr. Natural,” Atlantic Records refused to release their newest recordings, and American radio treated the trio as a faded 1960s act. Years earlier, the brothers had traveled in limousines before splitting up in 1969. When their career hit bottom five years later, Barry, Robin, and Maurice held together and took the northern English supper-club booking to pay their band and support their families. The turning point came through producer Arif Mardin, who urged them toward R&B, and their friend Eric Clapton, who suggested they leave London for the house at 461 Ocean Boulevard in Miami where he had just rebuilt his own career. In January 1975, the brothers settled near Biscayne Bay and entered Criteria Studios to record “Main Course.” During those sessions, Mardin asked Barry to scream higher at the end of “Nights on Broadway,” drawing out the falsetto that reshaped their sound. Each morning, as the brothers drove across the Julia Tuttle Causeway to the studio, their car tires hit the bridge’s metal expansion joints in a steady rhythm. Barry captured that beat on a small cassette recorder, played it for keyboardist Blue Weaver and drummer Dennis Bryon, and built “Jive Talkin'” around the sound of the bridge. To get past radio prejudice after its May 1975 release, the label sent “Jive Talkin'” to DJs in plain white-label sleeves without the Bee Gees’ name. By August 1975, the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the brothers later looked back on their week at the Batley club with gratitude as the lesson in humility that saved them.

In early 1977, inside an 18th-century castle near Paris, the Bee Gees wrote “How Deep Is Your Love” for another singer to record, until their own rough demo changed everyone’s minds. Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb had retreated to the Château d’Hérouville in France because of heavy British taxes. The quiet countryside gave the brothers something they needed even more. Years earlier, they had split apart in 1969 and later found themselves playing small northern English clubs when the hits dried up. At the French château, the old fractures had finally healed, and manager Robert Stigwood soon called asking for songs for an untitled film that became “Saturday Night Fever.” They had no script to read. One quiet day, keyboardist Blue Weaver sat at a Fender Rhodes electric piano while Barry described the mood he had in mind. As Weaver played the gentle opening chords, Barry began humming the melody on the spot, and Robin and Maurice soon joined him around the keyboard to build the words together. The brothers originally wrote the ballad for Yvonne Elliman. When Stigwood and the film team heard the fragile family harmony on the demo tape from France, they insisted the Bee Gees keep the song and gave Elliman “If I Can’t Have You” instead. The group later finished the strings and vocals at Criteria Studios in Miami while keeping the original backing track from that first French demo. Released in September 1977, “How Deep Is Your Love” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on Christmas Day, stayed in the Top 10 for a record 17 weeks, and won a Grammy Award. Long after Maurice and Robin passed away, Barry still called that gentle ballad his favorite Bee Gees song, because it held the afternoon the three brothers sat around one keyboard in peace.

In August 1963, Johnny Cash shook hands with four working-class singers at a fair in Virginia and promised them a spot on his tour without signing a single piece of paper. For nine years, Harold Reid, Don Reid, Phil Balsley, and Lew DeWitt had sung gospel harmonies around Staunton, Virginia, calling themselves The Four Star Quartet and later The Kingsmen. Between weekend shows, they supported their families as a delivery truck driver, a mechanic, an auditor, and an office clerk. After learning a rock band had just scored a hit under the name The Kingsmen, they renamed themselves The Statler Brothers after a box of Statler facial tissues sitting in a hotel room. When they drove to the Roanoke-Salem fairgrounds to see Cash perform, an introduction backstage led to an impromptu audition. Cash loved their four-part harmony and promised to bring them on the road as soon as an opening came up. Six months passed without a word. Neighbors in Staunton laughed when the four men claimed they were waiting on Johnny Cash, until the phone finally rang in early 1964. All four quit their steady jobs that same week for tour pay that was actually less than their wages back home. They played their first show with him in Canton, Ohio, on March 8, 1964, and a month later, Cash personally pressured producer Don Law and Columbia Records into giving the unknown quartet a recording contract. They stayed with his road show for eight and a half years, singing at Folsom Prison in 1968 and appearing on his ABC television series along with June Carter, the Carter Family, and Carl Perkins. Cash never signed them to a management deal or took a dime of commission from their earnings, and when they finally left to headline their own tours in 1972, he hugged each man and told them his door was always open.

As a schoolgirl in Timmins, Ontario, Shania Twain hid in the washroom during lunch hour so her teachers would not see she had no food, then later built private rooms inside elementary schools across North America so other children would never have to hide. Growing up in northern Ontario, there were weeks when her family had nothing in the refrigerator except mustard or mayonnaise to spread on a slice of white bread. Afraid that child welfare authorities might separate her siblings if the school found out, she often told teachers she had forgotten her lunch box at home. During sub-zero winters, she slipped plastic bread bags over her socks to keep melted snow from soaking through her worn boots, and she never forgot the day a principal walked into her classroom and set a brown paper bag of donated clothes directly on her desk in front of her classmates. In 2010, she launched the Shania Kids Can foundation to reach elementary students facing poverty and family turmoil at the exact age she had struggled the most. Remembering the shame of that brown paper bag on her desk, she insisted on a strict rule for the program. Instead of handing out charity in public hallways, the foundation builds dedicated spaces called Shania’s Clubhouse inside public schools across Canada and the United States, from Ontario and Niagara to Las Vegas and Nashville. Inside those private rooms, full-time support workers provide hot breakfasts, packed lunches, washers and dryers, one-on-one counseling, and shelves stocked with new winter coats and waterproof boots. During her Caesars Palace residency in Las Vegas, she spent mornings sitting on classroom floors eating breakfast with the students, and she continues to fund the clubhouses by donating one dollar from every concert ticket sold on her major tours.

Shania Twain was born Eilleen Edwards, yet she refused to let Nashville executives take her adoptive father’s last name off her records. After her mother divorced in 1967 and moved three young daughters to the mining town of Timmins, Ontario, she married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwe man from the Mattagami First Nation. Jerry legally adopted Jill, Carrie, and Eilleen, giving them his surname and registering them as official members of the Temagami First Nation. Life in northern Ontario was unforgiving. The family often ran out of heating oil and relied on wild game to survive the winter, yet Jerry quietly gave up his own portions of food so the five children could eat. In her late teens, Eilleen worked alongside him on his reforestation crews, hauling heavy bags of saplings across miles of rock and swamp for weeks without soap or running water. He expected the same hard work from her as the men on the crew, teaching her self-reliance while she composed melodies in her head with dirt on her hands. On November 1, 1987, Jerry and Sharon died in a highway collision with a logging truck north of Wawa, Ontario. At 22, Eilleen put Nashville on hold and took a resort singing job at Deerhurst in Huntsville, using her paychecks to buy groceries, pay bills, and raise her younger half-brothers Mark and Darryl, along with her nephew Zane, until the youngest finished high school. When Mercury Nashville signed her in the early 1990s and asked to change her stage name, she agreed to swap Eilleen for Shania. Giving up Twain or returning to her birth father’s surname was never an option. Whenever reporters later called Jerry her stepfather, she corrected them immediately. The man who raised her in the bush of northern Ontario never lived to hear her records on the radio, so she made sure his name was printed on every single one of them.

Buddy Holly planned to spend the winter of 1959 at home in New York with his pregnant wife, until his manager froze the money his records had earned. After marrying Maria Elena Santiago on August 15, 1958, the 22-year-old singer moved into an apartment at 11 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. He wanted to build his own publishing company, record quiet acoustic songs at home, and produce younger Texas artists like Waylon Jennings so they would be treated fairly. Around that time, a tip from bandmate Joe B. Mauldin’s father-in-law led Holly to look closely at his books, where he discovered that Clovis producer Norman Petty had been funneling the Crickets’ royalties into Petty’s own company accounts while adding his name as a co-writer on several of their hits. When Holly traveled back to New Mexico in late 1958 to separate his finances and ask for his share, Mauldin and drummer Jerry Allison chose to stay in Clovis with Petty and keep the Crickets name. Petty refused to release Holly’s earnings and locked the funds behind a legal dispute. The split left Holly without access to his income just as Maria Elena learned she was pregnant with their first child. Cut off from the money his hit records had already generated, he needed immediate cash to cover their New York rent, upcoming medical bills, and the lawyers hired to recover his royalties. In January 1959, Holly put together a new touring band with Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch for the Winter Dance Party, a grueling schedule of 24 Midwest cities in 24 days. Because Maria Elena was dealing with severe morning sickness and both had been troubled by uneasy dreams before departure, he insisted she stay safely behind in New York rather than travel with him as she usually did. Already an international star, Holly spent that subzero January riding buses with broken heaters across the frozen Midwest, starting over from scratch to provide for his wife and unborn child at home.

For his sixth birthday in 1942, Roy Orbison asked for a harmonica, and his father came home from the Texas oil fields with a guitar instead. Born in Vernon, Texas, on April 23, 1936, Roy grew up in a home shaped by long workdays. His father, Orbie Lee Orbison, drilled oil wells and repaired cars, while his mother, Nadine, worked as a nurse. Orbie Lee played guitar after work and knew a harmonica would keep his son from singing while he played, so he saved up for an instrument that let the boy do both. The gift gave Roy a place he struggled to find outdoors. Born with severely poor eyesight, he wore thick glasses from early childhood and stayed away from the rough sports common in West Texas oil towns. At night, Orbie Lee came home with grease still worked into his calloused hands and sat beside Uncle Charlie to guide Roy’s small fingers through his first chords on “You Are My Sunshine.” Those lessons soon earned Roy a rare privilege in the family living room. On nights when relatives gathered to sing through the lean war years, he was allowed to stay up past bedtime to play along with the adults. By 1944, at age eight, the shy boy won first prize in a youth talent contest on local radio station KVWC in Vernon. When the family relocated to the oil town of Wink in 1946, that guitar traveled carefully with them. Three years later, at age thirteen, Roy formed his first band, the Wink Westerners, turning the quiet confidence he found beside his father into the beginning of a lifelong career in music.

When Shelby Blackstock and his wife Marissa named their newborn son in October 2026, they made sure Reba McEntire’s Oklahoma family name stayed right in the middle. The baby boy, called Archie by his parents, was given the full name Shelby Archer McEntire Blackstock. It is a direct continuation of a tradition that began in February 1990, when Reba welcomed her only biological child and named him Shelby Steven McEntire Blackstock. Thirty-six years later, her son chose to pass both his first name and his mother’s family name down to the next generation. Long before country listeners knew the McEntire name from concert marquees and number one records, it belonged to working cattle ranches in Chockie, Oklahoma. Reba’s grandfather, John McEntire, and her father, Clark McEntire, earned respect across the West as world champion steer ropers who raised their families through hard ranch labor. Keeping that name alive has taken on added weight over the past decade. After her father passed away in 2014, Reba went through a painful divorce in 2015 and lost her mother, Jacqueline, in 2020. Through all of those changes, Shelby stayed close to his mother and proud of the people who shaped her. By putting McEntire on his son’s birth certificate, Shelby connected a child born in 2026 to the red dirt pastures where his great-grandfather once worked cattle from dawn until dark. For Reba, now 71, seeing her family name carried forward by her first biological grandchild is a quiet tribute from the son she raised. While the family will call him Archie every day, his full name ensures that the heritage Clark McEntire built in Oklahoma arenas and Reba carried to Nashville stages will stay with him for life.

On October 21, 2026, Reba McEntire’s son Shelby Blackstock and his wife Marissa introduced their newborn son Archie after years of fertility treatments and a tense first week. After marrying at Walt Disney World in February 2022, Shelby and Marissa spent years trying to start a family through in vitro fertilization. Behind the scenes, that effort meant hundreds of hormone injections, clinic appointments, and the quiet disappointment of failed cycles before a pregnancy finally held. Through every step of those treatments, Reba stayed close to her only biological son and his wife, offering steady support away from the public eye long before there was happy news to share. When Archie was born in October 2026, the couple still had to wait before bringing him home. According to their announcement, the newborn faced medical complications during his first week of life and required close care while doctors worked to get him stable. For parents who had already gone through years of procedures just to reach the delivery room, those first seven days meant watching over their son in a hospital unit until he was strong enough to leave. When the doctors finally cleared Archie for discharge, Shelby and Marissa could hold him skin to skin without hospital lines in the way. By the time they shared their first family photos on October 21, the hardest week was behind them. At 71, Reba now gets to hold a healthy grandson who made it home after a long fight by both his parents and himself.