Toby Keith

Toby Keith Covel (July 8, 1961 – February 5, 2024) was an American country music singer, songwriter, record producer, actor, and businessman.

Toby Keith Covel was born on July 8, 1961, in Clinton, Oklahoma, to Carolyn Joan (née Ross) and Hubert K. Covel Jr.

He has a sister and a brother.

The family lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for a few years when Keith was in grade school, but moved to Moore, Oklahoma (a suburb of Oklahoma City), when he was still young.

Before the family moved to Moore, he visited his grandmother in Fort Smith during the summers.

His grandmother owned Billie Garner's Supper Club in Fort Smith, where Keith became interested in the musicians who came there to play.

He did odd jobs around the supper club and started getting up on the bandstand to play with the band.

He got his first guitar at the age of eight.

After the family moved to Moore, Keith attended Highland West Junior High and Moore High School, where he played defensive end on the football team.

Keith graduated from Moore High School and worked as a derrick hand in the oil fields.

He worked his way up to become a supervisor.

When Keith was 20, he and his friends formed the Easy Money Band, which played at local bars and roadhouses as he continued to work in the oil industry.

At times, he would have to leave in the middle of a concert if he was paged to work in the oil field.

In 1982, the oil industry in Oklahoma began a rapid decline and Keith soon found himself unemployed.

He fell back on his football training, and tried out for the professional Oklahoma Outlaws.

When he did not make the team, he joined its unofficial semi-pro farm club, the Oklahoma City Drillers, and played defensive end while continuing to perform with his band.

He then returned to focus once again on music.

Keith and his friends formed the Easy Money Band.

Easy Money began playing the honky-tonk circuit in Oklahoma and Texas.

Keith went to Nashville, Tennessee, where he busked along Music Row to no avail, until producer Harold Shedd signed him with Mercury Records after receiving a copy of Keith's demo tape from a flight attendant who was a fan of Keith's.

In the 1990s, he released his first four studio albums—Toby Keith (1993), Boomtown (1994), Blue Moon (1996), and Dream Walkin' (1997)—and Greatest Hits Volume One under Mercury Records.

These albums all earned gold or higher certification and had several top ten singles, including his chart-topping debut "Should've Been a Cowboy".

Keith's debut single, "Should've Been a Cowboy", went to number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1993, and it reached number 93 on the Billboard Hot 100.

This song led off his self-titled debut album.

Certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipments of one million copies, the album produced three more Top 5 hits on the country charts with "He Ain't Worth Missing" (at #5), "A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action" (originally the B-side of "Should've Been a Cowboy"), and "Wish I Didn't Know Now" (both at #2).

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic wrote of the album, "It is given a production that's a bit too big, clean, glossy and cavernous for Keith's good—it fits the outsized sound of early-'90s radio, but not his outsized talent—but beneath that sheen the songs are very strong."

He also thought that it showed the signs of the style that Keith would develop on subsequent albums.

Signed to DreamWorks Records Nashville in 1998, Keith released his breakthrough single "How Do You Like Me Now?!" in late 1999.

This song, the title track to his 1999 album of the same name, was the number one country song of 2000, and one of several chart-toppers during his tenure on DreamWorks Nashville.

His next three albums, Pull My Chain, Unleashed, and Shock'n Y'all, produced three more number ones each, and all of the albums were certified 4× Platinum.

His longest-lasting number one hits are "Beer for My Horses" (a 2003 duet with Willie Nelson) and "As Good as I Once Was" (2005), at six weeks each.

He was nominated for seven Grammy Awards.

Keith was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Donald Trump in a closed ceremony alongside Ricky Skaggs on January 13, 2021.

Keith died on February 5, 2024, following a two-year battle with stomach cancer.

Greatest Hits 2 followed in 2004, and after that, he released Honkytonk University in 2005.

When DreamWorks closed in 2005, Keith founded the label Show Dog Nashville, which merged with Universal South Records to become Show Dog-Universal Music in December 2009.

He released ten studio albums through Show Dog/Show Dog-Universal: 2006's White Trash with Money, 2007's Big Dog Daddy, 2008's That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy, 2009's American Ride, 2010's Bullets in the Gun, 2011's Clancy's Tavern, 2012's Hope on the Rocks, 2013's Drinks After Work, 2015's 35 MPH Town, 2017's The Bus Songs, and 2021's Peso in My Pocket, as well as the compilation 35 Biggest Hits in 2008.

Keith also made his acting debut in 2006, starring in the film Broken Bridges, and co-starred with comedian Rodney Carrington in the 2008 film Beer for My Horses, inspired by his song of the same name.

Keith released 19 studio albums, 2 Christmas albums, and 5 compilation albums, totaling worldwide sales of over 40 million albums.

He charted 61 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including 20 number one hits and 22 additional top 10 hits.