It’s been about 18 months since Toby Keith died of stomach cancer on Feb. 5, 2024. It was estimated that Keith had the largest audience (some 25 million fans) among ordinary, working-class Americans of any singer in his generation. He was known for his patriotism, traditional values, and support for the military. His songs spanned a wide range of country genres, from rousing bar songs and patriotic tunes to sensitive ballads and love songs. His rich humanity was on display in songs that blended comedy, romance, national pride, and serious reflection.
Like President Trump, Keith found the greatest support among heartland listeners. His heartland traditionalism, a reflection of his Oklahoma upbringing and identification, was akin to Trump’s “commonsense” conservatism. In fact, a discussion of Keith’s music can contribute to our understanding of what the president means by “commonsense” positions.
Born in Clinton, Oklahoma, and raised in Ft. Smith, Arkansas and Moore, Oklahoma (just south of Oklahoma City), Keith played high school football, worked the oil rigs, and played the bars and clubs around Oklahoma and Texas before moving to Nashville and being “discovered” by a record producer. Then followed some 25 albums, twenty number-one songs and dozens of top ten songs, and the rapid creation of a wide and loyal audience. This audience saw in Keith a reflection of themselves and a performer who did not condescend to everyday Americans but honored them — the very opposite, in this respect, of Hillary Clinton. That was the secret of his success, as it has been for Donald Trump.
President Trump does not need to define what he means by “common sense” policies because, for more than half of Americans, the correctness of those policies is obvious and, in fact, incontrovertible. For everyday Americans, the Declaration’s promises of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are fundamental.
American citizens are entitled to “life” — that is, security and safety from harm, whether from foreign enemies, domestic criminals, or an invasion of illegal aliens.
Americans are also entitled to “liberty,” the individual rights outlined in the amendments to the Constitution. These include the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, the right to free assembly, the right to “keep and bear arms,” and many others, including the limitation of the federal government to its delegated powers (Amendment 10).
Finally, the key phrase is “the pursuit of Happiness.” For liberals, this idea seems to have lost all meaning, but for commonsense conservatives, it is obvious what is meant: the right to freedom in all pursuits, whether commercial, personal, or collective. For example, the right to establish and operate a business without undue regulation and free of frivolous lawsuits; the right to privacy within one’s family; the right to study as one wishes and engage in a profession freely; and every other freedom related to the pursuit of happiness.
Toby Keith brilliantly articulated the heartland sensibility. Songs like “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” “I Love This Bar” and “How Do You Like Me Now?” convey a sense of defiant individualism not unlike the behavior of the president showing up at NASCAR or world wrestling events. “Beer for My Horses,” “American Soldier,” and “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” are among the finest patriotic songs of recent years, a list that also includes Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and Trace Atkins’s “Arlington.” “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” contains the iconic line stating that putting a “boot in the ass” of our enemies is “the American way,” a line that troops greeted ecstatically on Keith’s many visits to our military.
Keith’s songs were often rough-edged and unapologetic, a fact he acknowledged in a song called “Love Me If You Can.” In this song he asserts his right to speak his own ideas in his own voice, though not to impose them on others, implying that he is never going to surrender his rights, including his right to bear arms (to which he specifically refers) and his right to free speech.
For Keith, as for President Trump, it is also common sense to see that men and women are different in fundamental ways. Keith wrote some of the most beautiful (and traditional) love ballads of our time, including “Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You” and “Crash Here Tonight.” These classic songs are about the singer’s romantic feelings for the opposite sex. From the lyrics themselves and the manner in which Keith performed them, it’s impossible to imagine Keith in the unisex world that liberals wish to impose on us.
That division of the sexes and romanticism is also part of the commonsense perspective of the heartland. This knowledge did not need to be written down or conferred by the courts. It was part of the large store of “tacit knowledge” that nearly everyone carried with him, unchallenged until recently. According to commonsense standards, “men should be men” and “women should be women,” and certainly men should not compete in women’s sports or be allowed in women’s locker rooms. For most Americans, the idea that men and women are “the same” is preposterous — so much so that the point need not be argued.
One of Keith’s songs before his cancer diagnosis was a tribute to Wayman Tisdale, the NBA great and jazz bassist who died of symptoms related to his radiation treatment in 2009. Like Toby Keith, Tisdale was an Oklahoman and a conservative: His father was one of the most prominent preachers of his day, preaching out of the “Christ-centered” Friendship Church in Tulsa. When Keith sings, “I’m crying for me,” it’s almost as if he knew, long before he could have known, that he would follow his friend and die from cancer.
Those of us who followed his music understand what a loss we suffered with the death of Toby Keith. There were few performers who had the vision and the courage, even before Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, to be openly and apologetically patriotic, to assert personal liberty, and to articulate sex differences. Yet what Keith was asserting was hardly arcane; it was the commonsense understanding familiar to most anyone from Oklahoma and from the heartland. Like President Trump, Keith believed in commonsense distinctions and commonsense solutions, and even in his shortened life, he created a body of work that expresses that commonsense vision of America.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
Image: Toby Keith. Credit: Journalist 2nd class Brandan W. Schulze, U.S. Navy, via Picryl.