Tricia Keith was in tears in September 2023 when her husband sang “Don’t Let the Old Man In” on the stage of the People’s Choice Country Awards, where he had just been given the Country Icon Award. Five months later, on February 5, 2024, Toby Keith died at 62. A message posted to his social media pages said he “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 born Toby Keith Covel in Clinton, Oklahoma, in 1961. The Daily Mail reported that he sold more than 40 million records over his career. He is survived by his wife, Tricia Lucas, their children Shelley Covel Rowland, Krystal Keith and Stelen, and four grandchildren.
The illness
The Daily Mail said he was first diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2021. He said nothing in public until 2022, when he posted that he had undergone surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. “So far, so good,” he wrote. “I need time to breathe, recover and relax.” By June 2023, he told The Oklahoman, his tumor had shrunk by a third and his blood tests looked good.
In a January 2024 interview with 9News, he called his wife “the best nurse”. Of the treatment, he said: “I was going through all the chemo, radiation, surgery, and I got to the point where I was comfortable with whatever happened.” He leaned on his Christian faith, he said, and described cancer as “a roller coaster.” In December 2023 he played his last shows, three nights in Las Vegas, and joked afterward about getting “the trucks and buses fired up” for a US tour.
From the oil fields to Show Dog
Keith worked as a roughneck in the Oklahoma oil fields as a young man. The pay was startling: $50,000 a year at age 18, he told The Associated Press in 1996. Then the industry collapsed. “It about broke us,” he said. He played two seasons as a defensive end for the Oklahoma City Drillers, a farm team for the United States Football League, but found steadier money fronting a band on the roadhouse circuit in Oklahoma and Texas.
Keith met Tricia in an Oklahoma nightspot in 1981, when he was 20 and she was 19. They married in 1984, and he adopted her daughter Shelley. Plenty of people told her to send him off to find a real job, he later said in a Country Weekly interview.
When executives at Mercury Records disliked his album How Do You Like Me Now?, worried that women would find the title track disrespectful, he asked to be released from his contract. The album went gold on his new label, Dreamworks, and he sold 25 million albums there. For 20 years he ran his own label, Show Dog/Universal. Forbes named him the top-earning country artist of 2015, at $50 million. “Those figures make me laugh,” he said.
Patriotism and the backlash
After September 11, he recorded “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)”. It topped the Billboard country chart and drew harsh criticism. ABC pulled it from a Fourth of July special as too angry. Steve Earle called it pandering to people’s “worst instincts”. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks called it “ignorant”. Keith answered with a photoshopped image of her with Saddam Hussein on stage backdrops at his concerts, and he called off the feud late in 2003.
“I don’t apologize for being patriotic,” he told Newsday in 2007. He went on 11 USO tours for troops overseas. In January 2021, then-President Trump presented him with the National Medal of Arts, citing “extraordinary contributions to American music.”
