TRUE Believer
By Phil Sweetland

Never a follower, often outspoken, Toby Keith stays true to himself, his music and the causes he defends.

If ever there could be a country music performer who is at the top of his game both as a performer and an entrepreneur, that person would have to be the indefatigable, uncompromising, irrepressible Toby Keith. Country music was made for Keith and Keith for country music. His influence is everywhere, even though many of his fellow stars have churned out the blander, more watered down country that radio has featured the last decade. His rules-breaking, trailblazing, industry-shaping ways are proving that this is one cowboy who knows where he wants to go and how to get there.

But for all of that, the guy has maintained an Oklahoman’s blue-collar approach to all of his businesses.

“You get out what you put in,” Keith remarked shortly after completing his self-produced album, Big Dog Daddy. “I’ve always been the hardest worker and prided myself on that. I may not be the biggest star around, but nobody will ever outwork me. That’s my approach.”

As a two-time Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year and an American Music Award Favorite Country Male Artist, as well as a Billboard Top Country Artist—and the list of recognitions is really quite long, so we won’t belabor you with that much here—the guy is just on top of his game, period. And yet he projects that accessibility, that connectivity, even a humility, that is rare in such mega-stars.

And that’s to say nothing of his controversial image. No one knows better than Keith that, like all straight-shooting cowboys, he rubs some people wrong—including many on Nashville’s Music Row.

“I get roped into these political arguments, but the truth is I don’t see things right or left, I see them right or wrong,” he remarked. “If you put check boxes on the left and right for all the big issues, my list will go back and forth all the way down. But all I have to do is disagree with a hard core, far left liberal on one thing and they just mark me down with all the boxes on the right. And it’s pretty much the same thing on the other side.”

The song?“Love Me If You Can,” off the Big Dog Daddy album, is a number that says exactly how he feels about the world, Keith says.

“I’m not going to apologize for where I stand. I am who I am, and if that bothers people it’s okay. And if you agree with me, that’s fine too. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove. Not since 2000, anyway. My first seven years in the business I was fighting all the time to prove myself. But I’ve answered those questions.

“It’s been a blur, the last 18 months. It really has. I looked up the other day and thought about the 50 million airplays BMI honored me for a couple months back. I had no idea what that means. There’s no board, no big music ladder you can look at and say, well you started out down here and you’ve gotten up this far. So I asked them, what does it mean? They said it means Elton John, the Bee Gees, John Lennon. That put it in perspective.”

A good means of examining Keith’s appeal and drive is to compare him with the late, great Chris LeDoux, someone Keith admired and someone to whom the younger man bears numerous similarities.

As many of the finest and bravest athletes in the world and their countless fans gather in Las Vegas for the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, it’s a fine time for assessing the impacts of these two athletes-turned-country-music-performers. In examining LeDoux’s popularity, we gain some insights into Keith’s. In exploring Chris’ drive, we get some understanding of the motivational energy that propels Toby.

For Toby Keith is certainly a performer who has lived large and swung for the fences.

Both were pro athletes at very high levels. LeDoux, whose outstanding career in collegiate rodeo carried over into the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and led to his becoming World Champion Bareback Rider in 1976, was writing, recording, and performing his own music on the rodeo circuit. After leaving rodeo and entering the performance world full-time, he staged such high-energy concerts as only a pro athlete could hope to achieve, full of physicality and energy that became the blueprint for the live performances of Garth Brooks, who idolized LeDoux, and also the blueprint for Kenny Chesney.

Toby Keith, meanwhile, at 6 foot 4 inches and well over 200 pounds, was a holy terror of a defensive end who pro scouts these days would say had a nonstop motor. He was signed by the dirt-tough semipro team called the Oklahoma City Drillers, a farm team for the early 1980s United States Football League, the same professional league that produced Pro Football Hall of Famers Reggie White and Jim Kelly.

LeDoux passed on in 2005 of liver cancer at age 56. Thanks to Brooks’ assistance, LeDoux had scored his only Top 10 country radio hit with the Chris-Garth duet “Whatcha Gonna Do With A Cowboy” in 1992. The Chris-Garth connection is well-known. What is also less-known is how close Toby Keith and Chris LeDoux were.

LeDoux was managed—and his posthumous work is still represented—by TK Kimbrell, who, by the way, is Toby Keith’s longtime manager. Kimbrell and Keith have often discussed LeDoux and his work, and Chris was an early mentor for Toby. The men were friends who admired each other’s work greatly. “Should’ve been a cowboy,” Toby wrote and sang in his first hit in 1993, a fascinating musical self-portrait of an Oklahoman who had labored his whole young life in the oil fields and on football fields and thus never had the time to become a cowboy like LeDoux, Gene Autry, or Roy Rogers. “Should’ve learned to rope and ride,” Toby’s chorus continued, “wearin’ a 6-shooter, ridin’ my pony on a cattle drive / stealin’ a young girl’s heart / just like Gene and Roy / singin’ those campfire songs / oh, I should’ve been a cowboy.”

“Should’ve Been A Cowboy” became the most-played country single at radio in the decade of the 1990s.

Another thing Toby feels he should’ve been is a record producer. Keith added that difficult task for the first time on Big Dog Daddy. “The only reason I never produced an album by myself before is I didn’t have time,” he said between tour dates this summer. “Why not? Because I’m opening record labels and restaurants, working on movies and things like that. But I knew I was going to have to, across the board, dive in [to record production] if I wanted this album to be one of the best of my career.

“So,” Toby concluded, “I came in with guns blazing.” One of the new restaurants he’s referring to is Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill, named after his 2003 No. 1 hit “I Love This Bar.” A popular place, it’s an attraction in Oklahoma City’s booming Bricktown area.

Pro rodeo, pro football, and country music are brutally competitive fields, and the fact that Keith and LeDoux were able to be superstars in these widely divergent businesses helped make the two men such heroes to rodeo fans all over the world.

Another man who has excelled at both sports and music is the radio promotion wizard Scott Borchetta, now the president of Taylor Swift’s label, Big Machine Records, but for several years the head of promotion at Keith’s former record company, DreamWorks Nashville, where Keith had tremendous success between 1999 and 2005—when he formed his own label, Show Dog Nashville. In his DreamWorks years, Keith racked up an amazing dozen No. 1 Billboard singles at country radio, including “How Do You Like Me Now?!” and his post-9/11 signature classic, “Courtesy Of The Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).”

Borchetta, whose father, Mike, helped make superstars of the Beatles and the Beach Boys at Capitol Records in the 1960s, is himself a champion NASCAR Weekly Series truck driver at tracks around Music City. We asked the younger Borchetta how folks like him, LeDoux, and Keith are able to be so good in both music and sports.

“I believe it’s the champion’s mindset,” Borchetta said. “Failure actually is an option, it’s just not the option I choose. At DreamWorks, we gave Toby the confidence and support to go ‘Totally Toby.’ He had been held back by his previous record companies. I realized Toby was his own best asset early on. I told him, ‘You lead, you have the vision, we’ve got your back.’ ”

Toby Keith Covel was born in 1961 at Clinton, Okla. Oklahoma may be the most fertile ground in the world for not just country stars but country superstars. Vince Gill, Brooks, Keith, Reba McEntire, Roger Miller, songwriter Jimmy Webb, and Blake Shelton all came from there.

Clinton is located west of Weatherford and Oklahoma City on Interstate-40. The nearby small-town names tell a lot about what part of the country this is. The tiny Sooner State hamlets of Corn, Custer City, and Alfalfa are all in Clinton’s vicinity.

Keith has long been beloved in his home state and has just been named to the Class of 2007 of inductees for the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

Toby began working in oil fields early on, and the fitness that hard work required, along with his 6-foot-4-inch frame, helped make Keith a force at defensive end in a state whose football heroes include Oklahoma’s Bud Wilkinson and Oklahoma State’s Barry Sanders.

But like LeDoux, Keith’s musical passions took him far beyond the athletic field into the honky-tonks, the concert stage, and eventually to the recording studios of Nashville’s famed Music Row. Since Toby’s chart debut in 1993, only Kenny Chesney and George Strait have equaled his consistent country radio success. Of the three, Toby is the purest singer/songwriter—Chesney writes many of his hits, Strait none of his, and Toby just about all of his, often with longtime friend and cowriter Scotty Emerick.

Like Willie Nelson, one of Keith’s friends and collaborators, Keith has long forged his own way in the music business and never played the corporate game. This has made him persona non grata with some of the biggest and richest power players along Music Row and has doubtless cost Keith numerous industry-conferred awards. But any time the fans vote, Keith wins virtually every country award.

One recent year, he was nominated for nine Country Music Association awards—which are voted for by Nashville insiders— and won none of them. It was regarded by some as one of the most outrageous travesties in CMA Awards history and was a slap in the face for Toby’s legion of fiercely loyal fans around the world and for the American soldiers he loves so A good means of examining Keith’s appeal and drive is to compare him with the late, great Chris LeDoux, whom Keith admired and someone to whom the younger man bears numerous similarities. MARC MORRISON / RETNA LTD Americancowboy.com 2007 November-December 63 well and who have always been a core part of Keith’s fan base. “Fans often look for different things than industry types,” says leading country radio expert, Joel Raab of Joel Raab Country Radio Programming Consulting in Langhorne, Pa. “Toby’s never lobbied to win awards the way others have. It seems he’s more concerned with what the fans think.”

Raab, whose clients include many of the nation’s top country stations, was asked to explain Toby’s 15-year love affair with radio and with fans. “There’s nobody like him,” Raab says. “Toby’s got his own style and persona that appeals to the core country listeners. He’s a guy’s guy who also appeals to women.”

Keith also appeals to Hollywood producers and even to the notoriously fickle film critics. His feature film debut, Broken Bridges, released late last year, was the first co-production between Country Music Television (CMT) and Paramount Pictures, two subsidiaries of the global showbiz giant Viacom. The film costarred Kelly Preston, Willie Nelson, and Burt Reynolds.

Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Toby Keith, the country superstar who makes his acting debut in Broken Bridges, shows tremendous presence as Bo Price, an exsubstance abusing country music singer going back to his hometown after family tragedy strikes both him and high school lover Angela Delton (Kelly Preston).” Clearly, movie acting is yet another business that Toby Keith has the skills to conquer.

On the home front, the Norman (Okla.) Transcript reports Toby “and his wife Tricia have three children, Shelley, Krystal and Stelen and make their home in Norman.”

The singer has combined athleticism and musical virtuosity into a proudly individualistic career that continues to evolve with every concert, song, album, movie, and restaurant he creates. At age 46, Keith is a confident superstar with an easy smile and a tough persona who, unlike many of Music Row’s current poster boys, is neither squeaky-clean nor artistically predictable.

Like the rough and tough competitors at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, Toby is a brilliantly creative risk-taker whose every move is studied and admired by the most loyal and most knowledgeable fans anywhere.

<< BACK TO MAIN PAGE