Toby Keith, the country singer who topped the US album chart four times, has died aged 62. A post on his website said he died on Monday surrounded by family, adding: “He fought his fight with grace and courage.”
Keith had been suffering from stomach cancer. He announced his diagnosis in June 2022, saying that he had been in treatment for six months by that point.
Born Toby Keith Covel in 1961 in Oklahoma, Keith had an all-American, blue-collar youth that helped to inform a hugely successful body of songwriting. As well as being a guitarist from childhood, he was a promising American footballer who went on to play with the semi-pro Oklahoma City Drillers, and also worked as a derrick hand in oilfields.
He played in a honky-tonk band from the mid-1980s and began writing his own solo music. A demo tape made its way to a Mercury Records executive via a flight attendant fan of Keith’s and he was signed to the label. His self-penned debut single Should’ve Been a Cowboy reached No 1 on the US country charts in 1993 – the first of 20 chart-toppers across his career.
Keith grew his already substantial conservative audience with Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), a song written after the September 11 attacks in 2001 that addressed the US’s enemies and gloried in the subsequent conflict: “Man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July … you’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A / ’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way”. It caused a feud with fellow country artists the Chicks (then Dixie Chicks), with singer Natalie Maines saying it “makes country music sound ignorant”.
The song came amid Keith’s most commercially successful period: an almost uninterrupted string of 10 country No 1s between 2000 and 2004. But he continued to be a mainstay on country radio throughout his career and released his most recent album Peso in My Pocket in 2021.
Keith made numerous trips to the Middle East to perform for US troops. He described himself as a “conservative Democrat” and offered support across the US political spectrum, backing presidential candidates including George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
In September he gave an update on his cancer treatment, saying: “It’s a little bit of a rollercoaster. You get good days and, you know, you’re up and down, up and down. It’s always zero to 60 and 60 to zero but I feel good today.”
Keith is survived by his wife, Tricia Lucus, and their three children.