Toby Keith, Country Music's Brash, Patriotic Songwriter, Dead at 62 (2024)

Toby Keith, who injected Nineties and 2000s country music with an unapologetic dose of patriotism and an unrelenting swagger in songs like “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” “How Do You Like Me Now?!”, and “Who’s Your Daddy?”, died Monday following a diagnosis of stomach cancer. He was 62.

Keith’s family confirmed the death on social media, writing that the musician “passed peacefully” and was “surrounded by his family.” “He fought his fight with grace and courage,” they wrote.

Keith revealed his illness in 2022 but was actually diagnosed a year earlier. In the months that followed the diagnosis, he underwent treatment — including chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery — and dialed back his performing schedule. In the summer of 2023, he returned to the stage with a pair of pop-up bar shows in his hometown of Norman, Oklahoma. That fall, Keith gave his first television performance since his diagnosis, singing “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” the tale of mortality he wrote for Clint Eastwood’s 2018 film The Mule, at the inaugural People’s Choice Country Awards in Nashville. Keith performed his final concerts in December, a three-night stand in Las Vegas at Dolby Live at the Park at MGM.

Onstage at the People’s Choice Country Awards, his voice was strong, but Keith appeared thin. “Bet you all never thought you’d see me in skinny jeans,”he joked. It was a stark contrast to the burly, boisterous Toby Keith that barnstormed country music in the decades prior, striking an imposing presence on concert stages in flannel shirts (often with the sleeves cut off), jeans, and a straw cowboy hat. He looked every part of his nickname: “Big Dog Daddy.”

Toby Keith Covel was born July 8, 1961 — four days after Independence Day —in Clinton, Oklahoma. Music wasn’t his first calling. After high school, he followed in his father’s footsteps and took a job in the oil fields. “At 18 years old, it made me a man,” Keith told Dan Rather in 2018. Around that same time, he started playing music with his own group — the Easy Money Band — and played semiprofessional football during a downturn in the oil market. Music soon became his primary focus, and his demo recordings caught the ear of record executive Harold Shedd. “It was mainly the quality of what he was writing,” Shedd told Forbes in 2013. “It was unlike anything on the radio at the time, and it was still really good country music.”

Shedd signed Keith to Mercury Records and released his self-titled debut album in 1993. Remarkably, the album’s first single, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” hit Number One on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” was rich in Wild West hero imagery, name-checked singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and was written solely by Keith, who, despite having one of country’s most powerful voices, prioritized songwriting above all else. “I wanted to be better at it, and I wanted to write the best songs I could write,” he told Billboard in 2018. “So if I wouldn’t have gotten a recording contract and had some success, I would have still been pitching songs. God forbid, if something ever happened to you and you couldn’t sing no more or perform, you could still write songs.”

While many of his peers relied on “outside songs” written by professional songwriters, Keith wrote or co-wrote many of his own chart-topping hits: “Who’s That Man,” “How Do You Like Me Now?!”, “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This,” his duet with Willie Nelson, “Beer for My Horses,” “I Love This Bar,” “American Soldier,” and “Made in America” are among them.

But Keith didn’t just put his weight behind his singles. He wrote the majority of all of his album cuts, proof of a depth that went well past the radio dial. The title track to 1994’s Boomtown; “In a Couple of Days,” off 2010’s Bullets in the Gun; and the homage to his barkeep grandmother “Clancy’s Tavern” on the 2011 LP of the same name stand on level ground with some of Keith’s biggest hits. His fellow songwriters took notice: In 2015, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, followed by induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2021.

Yet for all the poignancy of Keith’s “Cryin’ for Me (Wayman’s Song)” and the self-deprecating cleverness of “As Good As I Once Was,” Keith could also be proudly brash. He titled his 2006 album White Trash With Money; asked “Don’t my baby look good in them blue jeans?” in the 2003 radio fodder “Whiskey Girl”; and released 2017’s Bus Songs, a collection of off-color ditties with titles like “sh*tty Golfer” and “Ballad of Balad” (sample lyric: “Walked in on my buddy with a female MP/The ugliest woman you ever did see”).

But his most polarizing song was 2002’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that found Keith — who entertained U.S. service members over 11 USO tours —warning foreign foes that the U.S. will “put a boot in your ass/it’s the American way.”

Detractors labeled it jingoistic. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks) called the song “ignorant” in a 2002 interview with the Los Angeles Daily News, a remark that ignited a public quarrel between the two disparate country stars. When Maines spoke out against President George W. Bush and the U.S. invasion of Iraq onstage in the U.K. a year later, Keith escalated the battle, displaying a doctored image of Maines next to Saddam Hussein at his concerts. Later, he suggested to reporters that he regretted the feud.

“It got pretty vicious sometimes, putting her and Saddam Hussein up on the screen. That was funny for a night or two, and then it was a little over the top for me,” he said. “I’m not that mean.”

If there was anything that hurt Keith’s standing in country music, however, it was his unwillingness to immerse himself in Music Row politics. He eschewed Nashville as his home base, distancing himself from the industry by living in Oklahoma and rarely attending awards shows. He won only three awards from the Country Music Association — the Nashville-based country organization — and found more success with the then-L.A.-centered Academy of Country Music, which crowned him its Entertainer of the Year in 2003. In 2020, the ACM recognized Keith’s songwriting by giving him an award named after his hero: the Merle Haggard Spirit Award.

In 2017, Keith performed at the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who went on to bestow the country star with the National Medal of Arts in 2020. That combination only reinforced the belief that Keith was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. But as he told Dan Rather in 2018, he was raised a Democrat and became an Independent.

“I’d never been a Republican, and my family were Democrats, but because I made the war cry,” he said, alluding to “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” “I got the checkmark. So that was the absolute biggest misconception. And they abused it over and over and I was cool with it, but they ran me out of their party.”