The working man who ruled the country charts

True to his roots, Toby Keith always made sure he didn’t “get above his raisin’.” The burly former roughneck proudly called himself “oil field trash,” even though his sales figures put him in rarefied company. After landing the biggest countryradio smash of the 1990s with “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” he had a streak of 20 No. 1 hits that made him one of country’s biggest stars, selling over 40 million albums. Keith’s songs encompassed macho swagger, deft wordplay, wry humor, and odes to boozy good times, including “Get My Drink On” and “Red Solo Cup,” a country-rap tribute to the plastic party cup that broke through to the pop Top 20 in 2011. After 9/11, he lashed out with the jingoistic “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which warned America’s enemies: “We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American Way.” Derided by liberal critics, Keith was unbowed. “The secret in this business,” he said, “is to make enough people hate you enough to get them to talk about you.”

Toby Keith Covel was born in Clinton, Okla., where his father was an oil rigger, said The Oklahoman. A Merle Haggard fan with a gift for songwriting, he worked “as a rodeo hand during high school and in nearby oil fields after graduation.” When the oil market crashed, he played semi-pro football, then worked the roadhouse circuit for years, singing at honky-tonks in Oklahoma and Texas. “Eventually, his path took him to Nashville,” said NBCNews.com, where he drew the interest of Harold Shedd, a producer who’d worked with Alabama and Shania Twain. Keith put out a self-titled debut that yielded four Top 10 hits and made him a star at age 32.

As the hits continued in the following decades, Keith branched out into business ventures, including a record label, a restaurant chain, and a liquor brand, said The Washington Post. A 2013 Forbes cover dubbed him “Country’s $500 million man.” Keith, who died of stomach cancer, was often pegged as a reactionary conservative. But he said that while he performed at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, he’d also played for Barack Obama and was registered as an independent. “It doesn’t matter which one you play for, you’re gonna get flak,” he said in 2017. “Most people don’t want to go, cause they don’t want the flak. And I take it as an honor.”