Toby Keith and the Soul of America

Americans want to be the good guys. They love the underdog, and they hate bullies. They despise injustice of any sort, and they want to be the avenging force which corrects such. In short, they all want to be heroes.

And when the Twin Towers graced the New York City skyline one day and were gone the next, Americans found themselves in a perfect position to live out their greatest inner desire: be the good guys who save the day. The next morning, every recruiter’s office in America had a line out the door. The only flights permitted were by military C‑130s to Army bases, carrying new recruits who left the day they signed their paperwork. And the soundtrack to this great outpouring of National Fervor was “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” sung by the Oklahoma-born Toby Covel, more widely known by his stage name, Toby Keith.

Keith’s was not an easy path to that position. Growing up poor, he went straight from high school to the oil fields, though he interspersed his upbringing and oil work with learning and loving country music. Although his first trip to Nashville was a failure, his demo tape eventually caught the ear of a music executive, and it was off to the races for Keith when his single “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” rose to number one on the charts in 1993. Fast-forward thirty years, and he’s in the twilight of his career, battling agonizing stomach cancer and rarely performing.

A joke often told in these spheres is that if you hear Toby Keith on the radio, you’d better start looking out for your draft notice. Ironic that the same propaganda that turbo-fueled Americans two decades ago leaves them worried today. Back then, Congress didn’t need the draft. America provided.

But looking back, Toby Keith’s music is more than what seems like the Platonic Ideal of Boomercon Kitsch and “Thank you for your service.” Rather, Toby Keith is the latest in a long line of country singers who speak directly to the heart of the American soul. It makes sense, given how Keith grew up in the heart of America, busting his ass in the oil fields for a chance to achieve his American dream of being a big country star. His story, like the story of so many other oilmen, rednecks, hillbillies, all-around hicks, white trash, and peckerwoods, was a microcosm of the macro trend of America as a place where you let your light shine, hoping it wouldn’t be snuffed out by hard reality setting in.

America is a Civilization, but it’s a Cowboy Civilization. Like the Mongols, it’s a place of tent cities and mile-wide, inch-deep oceans, even in its most storied sections in the east. But unlike the High Civilizations (or their bones) in Europe, the Orient, and in between, America is busy being born and not busy dying.

I’ve suggested before that if we are to use Spengler’s model, America is already its own separate High Culture. It even has a prime symbol, and you can find it in the Book of John, chapter one, verse five: And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. We want to be exemplars of anything and everything. This is why we’re such good salesmen, because we genuinely believe in what we’re selling because we have to. This impulse has its virtues and its very apparent drawbacks, and Toby Keith has a song for each of them.

Besides the aforementioned “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” Keith gives us two more anthems for the red-blooded American patriot in “Made in America” and “American Soldier.” Both of these songs, once you look past the Zombie Reaganism, are legitimate expressions of a very real American Civic Virtue and admiration for the Res Publica our forefathers built, as well as the desire to keep it going out of love for them. “Beer for My Horses” goes even further, suggesting that the American public solve the problem of evil men, injustice, and corruption by bringing back lynch mobs — It was a different time, okay? — a solution which appeals to the deepest instinct of Americans to tolerate neither evil nor sin, like Christ instructed and Robert E. Lee exemplified.

At the same time (and at the risk of sounding like a fun-sucking prude to the Dear Reader), Keith does celebrate, in his other songs, those very things which deteriorate and threaten to destroy that American project. “A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action” and “As Good as I Once Was” celebrate hard drinking and loose women, at the expense of a current partner in the former and an aging body in the latter. “Who’s Your Daddy?” does this even more explicitly, where Keith plays the role of an older woman’s backup man who’s taunting her situation, and “Red Solo Cup” is an explicit approval of blatant alcoholism.

Now, I know what you’re thinking or saying to your computer screen.

“Paul, Toby Keith is relatively tame compared to some of his predecessors.” You’re absolutely right.

“Paul, Outlaw Country’s whole brand is promiscuity, alcoholism, and generally profligate behavior, but it’s being done by based, tough, cool, white guys.” You are spot-on, Imaginary Reader.

But Toby Keith sings about these in a very prolific manner, unlike his predecessors Hank Jr. or Merle Haggard, though the Red-State Patriotism is also a through line of the genre (see “Okie from Muskogee,” which Keith has covered). In short, the distinction is the most apparent with him. And it’s a contradiction every American more or less holds.

Americans want to be the people of the light. When it’s God’s light, they are blessed beyond measure. When it’s the false light, they are cursed beyond imagining. The problem is that light is light, and Americans can’t much distinguish between church windows and honky-tonk neon. And none exemplifies this more than Keith, who will praise America’s virtues out of one side of his mouth and lend his tongue to smashing them out of the other.

But those are the growing pains of a Cowboy Civilization, beginning to become a real High Civilization through an age of crisis. Keith’s music is indicative of the virtues and the vices, the latter of which need to be set aside for America to continue its existence. Otherwise, the boot will indeed be in our ass.