Toby Keith

Toby Keith Covel was born on July 8, 1961, in Clinton, Oklahoma, to Carolyn Joan (nee Ross) and Hubert K. Covel Jr. He had a sister and a brother. The family lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for a few years during his grade-school years before moving to Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City.

His grandmother owned Billie Garner's Supper Club in Fort Smith, and summers there shaped him. He did odd jobs around the club, watched the musicians who came through, and started getting up on the bandstand with the band. He got his first guitar at the age of eight.

Keith attended Southgate Elementary, Highland West Junior High and Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma, where he played defensive end on the football team. He had planned to become a petroleum engineer, but after graduating he went straight to work in the oil fields rather than to college.

After high school Keith worked as a derrick hand in the Oklahoma oil fields and rose to supervisor. At 20 he and his friends formed the Easy Money Band, which played local bars and roadhouses while he kept his oil job. When the oil industry collapsed in 1982 he played defensive end for the Oklahoma City Drillers of the semi-pro American Football Association. The team folded after two games and he returned to music, taking the band around the honky-tonks of Oklahoma and Texas.

He tried his luck busking on Nashville's Music Row with no success, until a flight attendant who was a fan handed his demo tape to producer Harold Shedd, who signed him to Mercury Records. His debut single, "Should've Been a Cowboy", reached number one on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1993, and his platinum self-titled debut album added top five hits including "A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action" and "Wish I Didn't Know Now". Further albums on Polydor, A&M and Mercury, including Boomtown, Blue Moon and Dream Walkin', produced number ones "Who's That Man" and "Me Too", and a duet with Sting on "I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying".

Moving to DreamWorks Nashville in 1999, he released "How Do You Like Me Now?!", the number one country song of 2000. Pull My Chain (2001), Unleashed (2002), Shock'n Y'all (2003) and Honkytonk University (2005) made him one of the biggest stars in the genre, with number ones including "I Wanna Talk About Me", "My List" (CMA Single of the Year 2002), "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)", "Who's Your Daddy?", "Beer for My Horses" with Willie Nelson, "I Love This Bar", "American Soldier", "Whiskey Girl" and "As Good as I Once Was".

When DreamWorks closed, he founded Show Dog Nashville on August 31, 2005, later merged into Show Dog-Universal Music. He produced much of his own later work, scoring more number ones with "Love Me If You Can", "She Never Cried in Front of Me", "God Love Her", "American Ride" and "Made in America", plus the crossover hit "Red Solo Cup". The Bus Songs (2017) topped the Billboard Comedy Albums chart for 11 weeks. His final studio recording was "Ships That Don't Come In" with Luke Combs for a Joe Diffie tribute album.

Over three decades he had 42 top 10 country hits, released 19 studio albums, two Christmas albums and several compilations, and sold more than 44 million albums worldwide.

Keith starred as washed-up country singer Bo Price in Broken Bridges (2006), alongside Kelly Preston and Burt Reynolds, and wrote and starred in Beer for My Horses (2008) with Rodney Carrington. He co-hosted the CMT Music Awards, appeared on The Colbert Report and in Stephen Colbert's 2008 Christmas special, took part in the Comedy Central Roast of Larry the Cable Guy, and performed at the first TNA Wrestling pay-per-view in 2002.

In 2005 he opened Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill in Oklahoma City, and the chain later expanded across the United States through franchising. He also launched the TK Steelman clothing line in 2009. In July 2013 Forbes put him on its cover as "Country Music's $500 million man".

Keith married Tricia Lucus on March 24, 1984. He adopted her daughter Shelley, and the couple had two more children: Krystal, born in 1985, who performs as Krystal Keith, and Stelen, born in 1997. At his death he had four grandchildren.

His father, H. K. Covel, an Army veteran, was killed on March 24, 2001, when a charter bus collided with his car on Interstate 35. The family later won a wrongful death award.

Keith was a devoted University of Oklahoma sports fan, often seen at Sooners games and practices, a professional wrestling fan and a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. He was a Free Will Baptist.

Keith described himself in 2004 as "a conservative Democrat who is sometimes embarrassed for his party". He endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 but told Newsday in 2007 that he had never supported the Iraq War. In 2008 he praised Barack Obama as a leader, and that October he left the Democratic Party to register as an independent.

His patriotism centred on the military. Starting in 2002 he made repeated trips to perform for U.S. service members abroad, completing 11 USO tours. He performed at events for Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump, including the pre-inaugural celebration at the Lincoln Memorial on January 19, 2017, and defended those performances as service to the country and its troops.

"Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)", with its line about putting "a boot in your ass", drew criticism. Keith said he was dropped from ABC's 2002 Fourth of July special after host Peter Jennings objected to the song. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks called it "ignorant" in 2002, and after her 2003 London comments about President Bush, Keith displayed a doctored image of Maines with Saddam Hussein at his concerts. In August 2003 his representatives said he was done feuding with her. His 2017 pre-inaugural performance for Donald Trump also drew criticism, to which he responded that he did not apologize for performing for his country or its military.

In 2004 Keith helped found Ally's House, a charity for children with cancer named after Allison Webb, the daughter of a former bandmate, who died of Wilms' tumor before her third birthday. In 2006 he established the Toby Keith Foundation, which in late 2013 opened the OK Kids Korral, a home near the OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City where children with cancer and their families can stay free of charge. The annual Toby Keith & Friends Golf Classic raised more than $15 million for it over two decades. He told The Oklahoman in 2019 that it was his greatest accomplishment. He also filmed a public service announcement for Little Kids Rock, which supports music education in disadvantaged public schools.

Keith received seven Grammy Award nominations. He won the Academy of Country Music's Entertainer of the Year award, the Country Music Association's Male Vocalist of the Year award and the American Music Award for Favorite Country Male Artist, and "My List" was the CMA Single of the Year in 2002. In March 2009 the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation gave him the Johnny "Mike" Spann Memorial Semper Fidelis Award. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015, received the National Medal of Arts from President Donald Trump on January 13, 2021, and was given the first Country Icon Award at the People's Choice Country Awards on September 28, 2023. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame hours after his death and inducted in 2024.

Keith was one of the most commercially successful country artists of his generation, with 33 number one country singles by Wikipedia's count and more than 44 million albums sold. The Country Music Hall of Fame described him as balancing "brashness and bravado with a sly wit, a talent for catchy melodies, and a cowboy poet's flair for wordplay and colorful imagery". His independence as a label owner, his long service entertaining troops and the OK Kids Korral are central to how he is remembered in Oklahoma and across the country.

On his death Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt ordered flags flown at half-staff. Tributes came from Dolly Parton, Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton, Jason Aldean, Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, First Lady Jill Biden and Stephen Colbert, among many others. At a University of Oklahoma basketball game days later, fans raised red Solo cups and sang "Red Solo Cup" in his honour.

In June 2022 Keith announced that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2021 and had spent six months receiving chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. In December 2022 he described the fight as "pretty debilitating". He returned to the stage at the People's Choice Country Awards on September 28, 2023, and gave his final performances at Park MGM in Las Vegas in December 2023.

Toby Keith died peacefully in his sleep in Oklahoma on February 5, 2024, aged 62, surrounded by his family. A statement posted to his website and social media said: "Toby Keith passed peacefully last night on February 5th, surrounded by his family. He fought his fight with grace and courage. Please respect the privacy of his family at this time." He was survived by his wife Tricia, his children Shelley, Krystal and Stelen, four grandchildren, his mother and two siblings.