A lefty writer who loves Toby Keith
For many liberals, Toby Keith was one of the signal cultural villains of the 21st century: author of a jingoistic post-9/11 anthem, antagonist to the Chicks’ Natalie Maines, one of the few musicians willing to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration.
I’m a lefty writer who spent more than a decade working as a cultural critic, but I’ve loved Keith’s music my entire adult life. And with his death at 62 from cancer, I found myself taking another moment to really listen to his songs.
His marvelous voice
Before contemplating anything he said with it, pause to consider Keith’s voice. He had a marvelous, deep baritone, not just low but also capacious.
Keith could use his voice to sound like Elvis at the King’s syrupiest in tracks like “We Were in Love,” or as a kind of time machine, urging listeners to “Go West, young man, haven’t you been told? California’s full of whiskey, women and gold.” The smooth deployment of his voice could turn a neighborhood establishment into something special, as in an ode to a place where “the girls next door dress up like movie stars.”
At times, he was purely silly, especially in songs that bridged rap and country, drawling in ways that disguised the underlying intelligence of the songs. And if the mark of a memorable singer is the ability to deliver a line in a completely distinctive way, the rawness Keith applied to a late chorus of “How Do You Like Me Now?” surely qualifies him.
That voice helped make Keith an appealing, amiable host of what sometimes felt like a party to which the whole country was invited. “I Love This Bar,” from his 2003 album, “Shock’n Y’all,” imagined yuppies and bikers, “high-techs” and “rednecks” bellied up to the rail together, all drinking beer out of Mason jars.
Keith’s vision of the community of “Drunk Americans” suggested that he could see himself in both “ball caps and turbans,” in “CEOs, GEDs, DUIs, FBIs, PhDs.” (In this unifying dream of one nation under the influence, the only people excluded from Keith’s vision were the sober.)
Keith was also just funny. Take “Red Solo Cup,” an intentionally dumb, supremely affable 2011 ode to a beer pong and tailgate essential. In a voice just a few sips shy of a slur, Keith delivers the lines “In 14 years they are decomposable / And unlike my home, they are not foreclosable / Freddie Mac, kiss my a--.”
It was both self-deprecating comedy and a sharp reminder of just how long a shadow the 2008 financial crisis cast over ordinary Americans. He undercut what could have been the misogyny of a song like “I Wanna Talk About Me” or the potential darkness of frontier-justice anthem “Beer for My Horses” with deliberately silly music videos.
What Keith saw
That geniality also meant that I found it easier to see certain perspectives through Keith’s eyes.
There’s a lot that’s ridiculous about “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” his 2002 song dashed off in response both to his father’s death and to the 9/11 attacks. The image of the Statue of Liberty “shaking her fist” in the general direction of Osama bin Laden is beyond hokey. And even at the time, the doctrine that “We’ll put a boot in your a-- / It’s the American way” was a clear roadmap to a quagmire.
But what’s not absurd is Keith’s memory from the second verse of the song: his father raising an American flag in his front yard every day to honor the country for which he gave his right eye. “Courtesy of the Red White, White and Blue” is bad foreign policy, but Keith’s recollection renders it comprehensible as the sort of profound emotional reaction so many people had — but couldn’t express on a national scale — after 9/11.
And while I have no nostalgia for mob justice, Keith’s 2003 collaboration with Willie Nelson, “Beer for My Horses,” was appealing in its invocation not of law and order but of community. Keith was never going to sell a modern audience on a return to public hangings and shootouts with desperadoes.
But the image of him and Nelson celebrating making their town a better place by ordering whiskey for the humans and pitchers for the equines expressed the same camaraderie as Keith’s party songs. In one of those inexplicable decisions you make when you’re young, my college roommate and I adopted “Beer for My Horses” as a kind of personal anthem.
A lesson in complexity
Loving Keith’s music never meant endorsing every decision he made as a man. And I’m grateful for the lessons in complexity that Keith taught me: that a beautiful voice can be used to sublime or foolish ends, that values I share, such as respect for military service, can lead to actions I deplore.
“I always dreamed about living in your radio,” Keith sang in “How Do You Like Me Now?” If there’s any justice, his songs, and his voice, will continue to do just that.