The 1990s File Feature
What If
Reba McEntire's "What If": Country Royalty Crosses Over Reba McEntire's position in American country music by the late 1990s was, by any measure, extraordina…
01 The Story
Reba McEntire's "What If": Country Royalty Crosses Over
Reba McEntire's position in American country music by the late 1990s was, by any measure, extraordinary. She had released her debut album in 1977 and spent the two decades since building one of the most durable commercial careers in the history of the genre, with more than two dozen number 1 hits on the Billboard Country chart, multiple Grammy Awards, and a cultural presence that extended well beyond the country music audience. Her 1990 sitcom and later theatrical work had established her as a multimedia entertainment figure of the first rank, and her recording career had demonstrated a consistent ability to adapt her sound to changing commercial landscapes while maintaining the emotional directness and vocal authority that had defined her from the beginning.
"What If" was released as a single in December 1997, drawn from her album "If You See Him," a collaborative project shared with country star Brooks and Dunn. The album concept paired McEntire with the duo on alternating tracks, allowing each artist to explore shared thematic territory from their own perspective. The project was released on MCA Nashville, McEntire's long-time label home, and was accompanied by a promotional campaign that emphasized the partnership's commercial logic while allowing each artist to demonstrate their individual strengths. The formula was commercially sound: Brooks and Dunn were among the dominant acts in country music in the mid-1990s, and the pairing of their fan base with McEntire's created a potential audience of substantial size.
"What If" was written by Tommy Barnes and Bobby Braddock, the latter a legendary figure in Nashville songwriting who had co-written such country classics as "He Stopped Loving Her Today" (George Jones) and "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" (Tammy Wynette). Braddock's involvement was a quality signal that the song had been developed with care and expertise, and the resulting lyric demonstrated the hallmarks of Nashville's best traditional craftsmanship: clear emotional stakes, a memorable hook, and a central question that resonated with genuine human experience. The production, handled by Tony Brown and Bruce Hinton, was polished and contemporary while remaining solidly rooted in the country mainstream.
The single made its Billboard Hot 100 debut on December 13, 1997, entering at position 86. Its chart trajectory showed steady, patient progress: from 86 to 68, then 63, then 55, before reaching its peak. The song achieved its highest position of number 50 on January 10, 1998, after accumulating momentum over the holiday period that typically slowed the chart movement of many singles. The 15-week chart run reflected the song's performance across both country and crossover radio formats, with the Hot 100 position representing the pop mainstream's engagement with a song whose core audience was concentrated on the country chart, where it performed substantially more strongly.
On the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Tracks chart, "What If" was a more significant commercial performer, reaching the top 5 and spending several months receiving airplay across country radio. McEntire's promotional activities in support of the single included performances on major television programs and a tour with Brooks and Dunn that extended the collaborative concept from the studio into the live context. The combination of album tour support, radio promotion, and television appearances provided the kind of sustained promotional platform that major-label country releases of the late 1990s typically required to convert airplay into chart performance.
The "If You See Him" album reached number 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, confirming the commercial viability of the collaborative concept and demonstrating that McEntire's audience would follow her into unfamiliar territory as long as the quality of the material justified the experiment. "What If" occupies a modest but solid position in her catalog, representing the moment when one of country's most established artists demonstrated, once again, that her commercial instincts remained as sharp as they had been at her peak. The song's crossover Hot 100 performance, modest as it was relative to her country chart success, extended her reach into audience segments that were not primarily country listeners, a consistent objective of McEntire's career management throughout the decade.
02 Song Meaning
The Hypothetical Heart: Loss, Regret, and the Power of "What If"
Bobby Braddock and Tommy Barnes's "What If" belongs to a distinguished tradition in country music songwriting: the lyric that locates its emotional power not in what has happened but in what might have been different if different choices had been made. The interrogative form of the title is itself the song's central argument. By structuring the lyric around a series of hypothetical questions rather than declarative statements, the songwriters position the narrator in a space of permanent uncertainty, someone who cannot know what the alternative choices would have produced and who is consequently unable to fully close the emotional account of a past relationship.
The "what if" question that country music has always understood is that the most painful form of regret is not necessarily regret about things done but about things left undone, words unsaid, choices not made. The narrator of this song is not mourning a relationship that ended badly through conflict or betrayal but one that may simply have ended before its time, through circumstances or decisions that retrospective wisdom questions. This more ambiguous form of romantic loss is, in some ways, harder to process than more dramatic endings because it lacks the closure that even painful conclusions can provide.
Reba McEntire's vocal performance brings a particular authority to this material. Her voice carries decades of country music tradition, and when she inhabits a lyric of romantic questioning and regret, she does so with the weight of someone who has sung about love and loss long enough to understand that these experiences resist simple resolution. McEntire has always been a singer who inhabits her material rather than performing it from a distance, and "What If" benefits enormously from this quality of embodied understanding. The questions she asks sound genuinely open rather than rhetorically settled.
The song also participates in a larger cultural conversation about the nature of romantic choice and commitment that was particularly active in the late 1990s country mainstream. The genre had long been comfortable with the emotional complexity of relationships in ways that pop music sometimes avoided, and "What If" reflects this comfort: it does not offer resolution or consolation but rather sits with the discomfort of not knowing, acknowledging that some questions about the past cannot be answered and must simply be carried.
Bobby Braddock's Nashville craftsmanship is evident in the architecture of the lyric. The central question is repeated with variations that accumulate emotional weight rather than simply restating the same point. Each iteration of the "what if" opens a slightly different angle on the narrator's situation, building a composite picture of loss and speculation that is more dimensioned than any single statement could achieve. This structural technique, familiar from Braddock's earlier classic work, transforms a simple question into a complex emotional investigation.
The song's enduring resonance with country audiences reflects the genre's longstanding commitment to emotional honesty about the full range of romantic experience, including its most unresolved and ambiguous dimensions. The "what if" question that the song poses is one that most adults have asked themselves about at least one significant relationship, and Braddock and Barnes's achievement was to frame that question in language precise enough to feel personal and universal enough to apply across the widest possible range of specific experiences. McEntire's performance makes those experiences feel real and immediate, which is, finally, what the best country music has always done.
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