After decades in the entertainment business, the Queen of Country knows how to work a room.
Coach Reba McEntire is indisputably one of the greatest entertainers in the history of country music, and she’s got the trophy case to prove it. The winner of Grammys, ACM Awards, CMA Awards, and so much more, the Queen of Country has also spent years successfully touring the world singing her hits, playing to massive crowds.
But it’s not just the huge stadiums. As she’s proven time and time again in her two seasons as Coach Reba on The Voice so far, McEntire knows how to work a small room too, playing to the show’s studio audience as often as possible. This week, she proved it all over again by leading the crowd in a singalong on Monday night’s show.
Watch Reba McEntire’s Surprise Performance of “Why Haven’t I Heard From You” on The Voice Season 25
Photo: Casey Yubi Durkin/NBC
Though the contestants become stars in their own right over the course of the season, the constants on The Voice each episode, aside from Host Carson Daly, are the Coaches at the center of the room, and that’s particularly true during the Blind Auditions.
These early episodes are parades of new talent coming in and out of the room, drawing all kinds of reactions from the crowd, but in the moments between those auditions, it’s up to the Coaches to keep the energy in the room up through banter, jokes, props, and yes, singing. We see several choreographed live performances from Coaches and special guests during each season of The Voice, but sometimes things just happen spontaneously, and that’s what Episode 3 brought.
Walking back and forth across the stage in between auditions, Coach Reba began to lead the studio audience in her 1994 hit “Why Haven’t I Heard From You,” one of her most enduring country tunes from the triple platinum album, Read My Mind. The audience was more than happy to play along, even doing call and response with the country legend from different sides of the stage.
It was entertaining enough that it could very well have stopped the show entirely, leaving Reba and her fans to sing all night.