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In the spring of 1993, Mercury Records loaded three of its new country signees onto a bus and sent them on a 15-city tour, hoping to raise their profile. It was an incredible gathering. There was John Brannen, a troubadour with a rootsy sound and a quaver reminiscent of Roy Orbison. He took turns opening and closing the slot with Toby Keith, a former Oklahoma oil field worker and semi-pro defensive end. Playing in between was Shania Twain, a brash Canadian from hardscrabble backgrounds. In fact, it was Twain who ran screaming to the front of the bus to tell Keith, who died Monday at the age of 62, that his debut single, “I Was Supposed to Be a Cowboy,” was playing on the radio.
“I should have been a cowboy” would be at the top. signboard Keith established himself as the trio’s breakout star on the Hot Country Singles chart that summer. The song is one of his 10 songs he wrote, featured on his 1993 self-titled debut, and is his biggest influence throughout this decade. He established the image of a person who gave him a “disappointing romantic.” It was a good lane and he navigated well. But joining Nashville’s ever-growing parade of crossover stars required me to dig deeper into my work as both a writer and a performer. He pulled it off (with a little help from outside forces) and became famous in the process. But the same forces that made him a superstar ultimately limited his reach, overshadowing a career of incredible length and variety.
Early in his career, the fastidious Keith was sometimes lumped in with country neo-traditionalists who sought a simpler musical and sartorial expression. These musicians still played tear-jerking songs, but they tended to be balanced out by leaner honky-tonk crowd-pleasers. Keith was more interested in ballads. The only line-dance-friendly cuts on his debut were two songs he didn’t write. “Who’s That Man” (his second country No. 1) was a minor songwriting masterpiece. A divorced man visits his family and realizes what happened when they were there (“Turn left at the old hotel/I know this boulevard too well”) and then .
Equally harrowing singles followed, including the plaintive, fumbling love song “Me Too,” which reached number one in Keith’s third country. By now, his muscular yearning had practically become his trademark. 1997 title song dream walking “She took my new sunglasses and my old jean jacket/And she didn’t even ask.” The album also features her biggest pop production to date. It’s a cover of Sting’s Nashville ready-made song “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying,” with the Brit himself providing bass and backing vocals. Although the collaboration led to Keith’s first Grammy nomination (and Sting’s only appearance on the country charts to date), Keith was left unfulfilled.
It probably didn’t help that former tour mate Twain turned. she His 1997 Mercury Records album made him a master of the pop world. Keith proved to be a thoughtful craftsman and was the rare country star who wrote most of his songs himself. But while contemporaries like Twain, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, and the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) achieved pop-country superstar status, Keith was still exploring his potential. Was. “This is not a business where we compete with each other,” he thought early in his career. “This is like golf. This is the course you play.”
When Keith moved to DreamWorks in Nashville (where director Steven Spielberg was a backer), he accepted a different template. It’s a little hammy, a little rambunctious, and relies on fake smiles instead of strings. The album title tells its story well. What about me now?!, pull my chain, Unleashed. The single “How Do You Like Me Now?!” topped the charts in 10 countries in 5 years. It was a kiss-off anthem, with an upbeat chorus belying the cruelty of the verses. “He never comes home and you’re always alone/And your kids hear you crying in the hallway.” The song was his top country song of 2000. , was the first of 16 Top 40 pop hits for Keith. To put this in football terms, this guy, once a contender in the American Football League, introduced an entirely new plan and quickly won the league.
But the game quickly changed. Keith’s frenetic post-9/11 single, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” achieved cultural notoriety that far outweighed its radio performance (his week at No. 1 on the country charts). Obtained. It’s one of the rawest songs ever played on country airwaves, harnessing Keith’s unleashed personality to a disastrous conclusion (“I’ll put my boot up your ass/That’s the American way”). is”). In a field with no shortage of candidates, it looked like this: of It is a pro-war country song in the pop culture consciousness, and perhaps Keith’s signature song outside of Music Row.
He finally had a pop profile to rival the McGraws of the world — and after playing on the course, he was free to make some noise in the clubhouse. Keith’s feud with Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines (who publicly plagiarized the message of “Angry Americans”) was shocking for how it brushed aside the professional, casual demeanor so common in country music. It was spot on. Eventually, Keith began to express his regret at his reactions, including placing a photo of himself next to a photo of Saddam Hussein during his concert. However, his initial reaction revealed that perhaps it is the change in his reputation that bothers him the most. “I’m a songwriter. She’s not a she.”
Still, “songwriter” would never be a major part of Keith’s public image. Nor was he a culture warrior like Ted Nugent or John Rich. He was just as likely to pull a punch as he was to throw one. The longtime yellow Democrat (and eventually a registered independent) spent the next few years trying to play in the middle. colbert reportAnd he praised Barack Obama’s performance as commander in chief. joy behar show–But for the general audience, it didn’t change his profile, it just kept it that way. He will remain an angry American.
that is unfortunate. Keith remained a reliable hitmaker into the late 2000s, in part because he revived the romanticism that drove his early hits. His attention had just shifted from his bedroom to the barroom. For every faithful production like “American Soldier,” there was “I Love This Bar,” an ode to the local watering hole that squeezed tech workers, veterans, and strippers into the same booth. For every “Beer for My Horses” (a disturbingly rousing celebration of vigilante justice featuring Willie Nelson), he offers a Brad Paisley-esque take on choosing his spot in midlife. wrote the farce “As Good as I Once Was”. “I used to be a hell of a car driver,” Keith enthuses about the bridge, offering a glimpse of the yearning he so easily conjured “when I was younger” and at the beginning of his career.
New country singers replaced Keith in the 2010s, just as neo-traditionalists did for pop-country crooners like BJ Thomas and Juice Newton. The double-beat scream of Keith’s “I Wanna Talk About Me” was ditched in favor of a rhythm culled from rap. His peers embraced honky-tonk as both a style and a setting. Singers like Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean were more likely to toast at a tailgate than shed a tear into beer. (Still, Keith’s last Top 40 hit, the loop-de-loop singalong “Red Solo Cup,” showed he was better than ever when it came to creating brotherhoods. ) Toby Keith — Just like Kenny, Chesney and Twain used larger-than-life personalities to shift their stellar careers into higher gears. He left behind a catalog full of pathos and humour, people wetting themselves and stomping on the floor. To his detractors (and many fans) he may remain “The Angry American,” but the last compilation he published before his death revealed how he saw himself. did. 100% songwriter.
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