Politics pay off for Keith
NASHVILLE Shortly after country singer Toby Keith performed at U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration concert in January, his phone lit up with text messages. Many entertainers were terrified to get anywhere near Washington, D.C., but according to Keith, several had regrets about turning down the invitation to perform for the controversial new commanderin-chief.
“I’m not naming names, but there’s a bunch of people that … were committed, and they backed out due to pressure,” Keith, 55, said. “Then they all texted me afterward and said, ‘Every guy would like to be you, standing up there.’ ” Excuses ranged from “Our camp wouldn’t let us,” to “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.”
Keith, on the other hand, never considered cancelling on Trump. “I don’t apologize for performing for our country or military,” he said at the time, pointing out that he had played events for presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. His message was clear. This was about America, not party lines.
Still, Keith is undeniably linked with politics. He’s known as the country star whose post-9/11 patriotic anthem Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), famously includes the line, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.”
Throw in his feud with the Dixie Chicks, particularly after Natalie Maines criticized Bush right before the Iraq War, and Keith became one of the prominent celebrity voices in the last Republican administration. So now, as America embarks on a GOP era unlike any other and most country singers are staying quiet, what is the state of Toby Keith?
By all accounts, there’s every reason to believe that Keith will approach the Trump years just as he has every other significant point in his career, political or otherwise: By doing absolutely whatever he wants, and what he feels works for his brand. That’s what he did after he arrived in Nashville from Oklahoma in the early 1990s. Decades later, it’s still working.
Not only is he savvier than those who disregard him as just the “roughneck, boot-in-your-ass” guy, as one friend put it, he has a sharp instinct about how his fan base will react. As a result, he didn’t drop out of the inauguration, despite people telling him that he should.
Keith was working out at the gym shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks when he saw a talking head on TV say something like, “Well, I guess we could go bomb them. That would be so the American way.”
The words hit him hard. “I was like, ‘Well, what just happened to us? I mean, are we just supposed to stand by and let this happen? Can we not be mad as hell about this?’ ” Keith recalled. Inspired, he scribbled some lyrics on the back of a fantasy football sheet.
Later, he called his producer, James Stroud, and read the lyrics, which invoked Keith’s military veteran father who had just passed away. (“My daddy served in the Army/where he lost his right eye/ but he flew a flag out in our yard until the day that he died.”)
“I cried,” Stroud recalled. “I said, ‘Toby, you need to record this.’ ”