Reba McEntire’s “shell shocked” that she’s never done a duet with Dolly Parton until now

UMG Nashville

Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton are more than just two of country music’s most prominent female stars — they’re also longtime friends. So Reba is as surprised as anyone else that she and Dolly never collaborated until they joined forces for a new version of “Does He Love You.”

“I’m shell shocked. How have we not done one?” Reba says in a new Billboard interview. “Every time I’d hear Dolly doing a duet with somebody else, I would get a little sad or jealous, like, ‘I want to do a duet with Dolly.’”

Still, she adds, “[E]verything happens for a reason and timing is everything. So it worked out perfectly.”

The new version of “Does He Love You” comes off of Revisited, one of the three sections of Reba’s massive upcoming box set project, Revived Remixed Revisited, which puts new and updated spins of some of Reba’s best-loved hits.

The singer first cut “Does He Love You” in 1993 as a duet with Linda Davis. Now, almost three decades later, Reba says that she and Dolly approached the topic a little differently for their new version.

“It’s like confrontation on Valium. It’s kind of like, ‘I know you. You know me. We’re adults,’” she explains. “Whereas when I did it with Linda, that was mid-’90s, and it was like catfight city. Now it’s like, ‘I don’t like him. Do you like him? You can have him.’ So it was totally different. It was confrontation, but not hatred.”

Revived Remixed Revisited is due out this Friday.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.