Every generation, and likely every generation within a generation has a song, a moment, or a particular singer who sings for them, leads their soul back into a moment in time, a feeling tied to some event which immediately transports presence regardless of current life into the present. Music has a power that we can’t exactly understand or comprehend, and it’s probably better that we don’t know. The mystery is part of the joy. Sometimes the smarty pants folks need to just hush and let us enjoy things.
I awoke this morning to find out the troubadour of post-9/11 America had passed after a long battle with stomach cancer. While those of us in the know remember that Toby Keith had a hall of fame country career with 90s standards like Should’ve Been a Cowboy and Who’s That Man? it was the butt-kickin’ response to Al-Qaeda’s sucker punch on New York that catapulted him to the highest echelon of fame and fortune, Nashville royalty. However, that stay at the top wouldn’t be long because the United States that Keith represented was in the midst of losing its grip on the culture. The lily-livered traitors, who later doubled-down on their quislingness when they dropped Dixie from their name exposed a fault line that swallowed the last gasps of the old world like the sons of Korah. As they derided our president on foreign soil the Chicks represented the new way which would come to its own as country acts like Lady Antebellum decided their identity was too wrapped up in a civilization that would not have wanted them around anyhow.
In his song I Love This Bar Toby Keith presents an ethos, a personality that while intentional or not speaks to the lostness of American culture even twenty years later. As he lists the people who happen to be there it’s a who’s who of normalcy. Truckers, bikers, ladies dressed as Hollywood starlets, broken-hearted fools and suckers. Fighters, veterans, yuppies, and losers. It’s meant to represent in a more real way than Billy Joel’s similarly themed Piano Man a world where people leave off the difficulties of real life and just gather together to be no one in a house designed to drown sorrows and give opportunity to enjoy the blessings of community. I may be reading too much into it, but that’s what good art is supposed to do, allow the viewer, or in this case the listener, become as much a part of the scene as the people the artist put in there to begin with. Who hasn’t taken a second to look at Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World or Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon and placed themselves in the heartfelt longing of the lady arrayed on the field looking plaintively back up at the house or among the light, rhapsodic air of a day out in a crowd? The same is true of Keith’s ode to normal life.
A lot is written nowadays on any number of substack’s and blogs and online magazines lamenting the loss of life as it once was, and when a significant portion of intellectual life is engaged in asking the same questions its probably because there is something actually going on. Those of us who still long for the commonplace down home life is expressed probably the best in another country act’s Born Country, as they say, “Clear creeks and cool mountain mornings, honest work out in the field, corn bread in my mama's kitchen daddy saying grace before the meal, family ties run deep in this land, and I'm never very far from what I am.” That kind of sentiment is of course to be found in Keith’s work.
There is a scene ably drawn for us in How Do You Like Me Now? when Toby is teasing the girl who forsook him as a high schooler with dreams as big as his native Oklahoma sky. She like many before her sought fame and fortune in marrying for money and status, whereas Keith got there through guile and hard work. The easy way always seems easier until you realize the cost. Deals with the devil come with a monkey’s paw victory. As the narrator explains life in the big city ain’t worth the empty bed and lonely nights it requires. He might have had a red neck and a double-wide existence but he still had his soul. She’s locked in the requirements of status and maintaining her counterfeit friends. Toby’s living it up gaining the well-earned glory that persistence provides. Or as the good book notes, “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.”.
That simple truth shows who the true winner is in the story.
Much is made of the paucity of popular country that sounds like it used to. For sure it is still out there and the fanfare over the summer of wailing towards the men north of Richmond tells us the audience for such is still strong, however, so much of what is on the radio has bought into the bubble gum rock mindset. Country songs still talk about drinkin’, cheatin’, and fightin’, but they don’t accept the immorality and consequences of such that even the rhinestone cowboys recognized. One can miss the message of the old Nashville if you think Hank Williams (Sr or Jr or III) thought fast women, fast cars, and fast liquor were a benefit to one’s standing in life. Even David Allen Coe laments that the ritual poverty of his upbringing wasn’t worth all his dad had to steal to get it. Yet, he wasn’t interested in folks who were going to come to his house and moralize about it.
Take the log out of your own eye first, yankee.
Toby Keith meant a lot to a lot of folks and I morn with his family and his fans his passing. It’s a great loss to all of us, both as a man and as an artist. By all accounts he was a faithful husband, father, friend, and a long-time member of a freewill baptist church. However, his death represents just another fallen stone of the edifice that once was the South, the West (not the coast, the stuff between the Mississippi and the Redwoods), and fly-over America. Most folks seem fine with that empty subdivision life, but Keith wasn’t, and neither should you. Even if you do happen to exist at the end of a cul-de-sac there is a way of thinking, living, and dying he represented that’s worth keeping alive. God Bless America, even the coasts, but most of all let’s remember in Toby’s memory, that he wasn’t just a red solo cup, he’s our friend.
By Benjamin Glaser
Thank you.