Blake Shelton was in Nashville for the CMA Awards on Wednesday (11/13) and then on Thursday, he hosted a special episode of The Voice also in Nashville. Before the show got underway, Blake took some questions from press and revealed a little-known secret about NBC’s The Voice.
Blake said, “They wanted to Reba to be a coach on The Voice first… I hope I’m not saying something I shouldn’t say. It’s out there now. They wanted Reba and they knew they wanted a country artist to be a coach on The Voice to fill that lane. So they called Starstruck [her management] and Reba at the time. For whatever reason, I can’t remember — she may have had her Malibu Country show going at the time — [but] she couldn’t do it or they just decided it wasn’t the thing for her at the time.”
He continued, “But Narvel [Reba’s ex-husband and manager at the time] told them, ‘Reba can’t do it, but I got this other guy that I manage that’s got all the time in the world.’ I had done a show for NBC a couple of years before called Clash of the Choirs. That was a thing where I was a coach for a choir there and it was fun. And so they knew just enough about me that they just rolled the dice and said, ‘OK, well, we’ll try.'”
The rest, as they say, is history.