Pop Music : Reba’s Fine Voice Against Dull Songs

Reba McEntire confirmed an old adage at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim: It’s not the singer, it’s the song.

McEntire is a gifted, intense vocalist with soaring power and a firmly controlled country quaver. Despite those advantages, the singer from Oklahoma wallowed in dullness for most of Friday’s 70-minute early show. That will happen when a concert is devoted mainly to hit fodder culled from Nashville music mills.

The standoff between a fine voice and uninvolving songs finally ended, but only when McEntire reached back 20 years or more for some worthy material.

Singing a close-to-the-original take on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” might not have been the height of imagination, but it was a singular achievement for a country singer to pull it off without being overshadowed by the source.

McEntire also brought an edge and a some convincing role-playing to her remake of “Fancy,” Bobbie Gentry’s 1969 tale of a poor country girl who climbs the ladder of success by selling her body to rich gents. As usual, McEntire encored with a tour-de-force,a cappella treatment of Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams.”

McEntire spent far more time singing middle-of-the-road, pop-country hybrids. It was as if she were trying to be like another brassy redhead, Bette Midler, only with an Oklahoma twang. That wasn’t the wind beneath McEntire’s spurs--it was the ersatz waft of synthesized strings and the schmaltzy, hollow tinkling of digital keyboards, used as a cushion against intrusions of realism.

The only hints of traditional country style came in a Western swing dance number inserted so McEntire could change outfits, and in a long medley of heartbroken ballads. It was no great loss that the songs in the medley were truncated, because few of them rose beyond a rote familiarity of sentiment and expression.

McEntire could use some spare, tradition-minded country arrangements. It also wouldn’t hurt for her to get in touch with some songwriters whose material is personal and individual. After six years as one of country music’s two or three most popular female singers, she needs to get it into her head that a distinctive talent shouldn’t be wasted on songs that sound as if they were bought off the rack.