Singer, songwriter, guitarist

When singer/songwriter Toby Keith first entered the country charts with the 1993 hit single "Should've Been a Cowboy," the talk around Nashville was that, if you looked closely, you might just see a coating of dust on his cowboy hat. Not the smoky dust of the local dance hall, but the dust that comes from riding and roping and hard work. A former rodeo rider, oil rigger, and football player, the burly Keith wields his deep, dusky baritone to good effect on songs that range from rollicking barroom romps to heart-tugging ballads in the best country tradition. His easy way with audiences has gained him a following that has grown to encompass both aficionados of traditional honky tonk and fans of southern rock.

Keith was born in Clinton, Oklahoma, on July 8, 1961. As a young man and aspiring songsmith, he took his musical lead from southern rockers like the members of the Marshall Tucker Band, as well as country great Merle Haggard. A stint working for a supper club run by his grandmother gave Keith his first taste of show business; the house band would let him sit in with them on stage after his work was done in the kitchen. Although Keith and several friends had formed bands during their high-school years, the young Oklahoman's musical aspirations were destined to be put on the shelf for several years in favor of making a living. He went to work test-driving bulls for a local rodeo outfit; from there, it was on to four years in the oil fields of his home state. Keith also served a two-year stint as a semi-pro football player with the Oklahoma City Drillers—part of the now-defunct United Football League—before his desire to play a guitar lured Keith off the field and back on stage.

Went to Nashville for a Contract

Backed by a group of fellow rodeo riders who comprised his Easy Money Band, Keith toured the country-dance hall circuit of the Western states for almost ten years before making it big in Nashville. "You're up against the best bands in the world out there," Keith explained to Country Music's Bob Allen about life on the circuit. "The competition's fierce, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. I'm not bragging when I say that The Easy Money Band and I can hold our own against any of them." By 1991, Keith had decided to give his best shot at a Nashville recording contract. "I knew either way I wasn't gonna starve," he told Allen. "I was very successful with my band, and eventually, if I didn't get a record deal, I would've opened a nightclub somewhere and made a lot of money."

Visiting Music City, Keith recorded some demo tapes and made the rounds with them. While representatives of Liberty Records expressed enthusiasm, they were more interested in his talents as a musician and vocalist than as a songwriter. As a combination of talent, timing, and confidence would have it, one of Keith's demos eventually fell into the lap of a producer at Mercury Records. Upon one listen, he promptly scheduled a flight out to Oklahoma City and offered Keith a contract.

Releases Debut Album

Keith's self-titled debut album was released by Mercury in 1993. Toby Keith contained all original material, which, Keith explained to Country Song Roundup's Bob Paxman, was inspired by "things I see and what happens to others." The story behind the album's runaway number-one hit exemplifies this statement. On a quail-hunting trip that had a stop in historic Dodge City, Keith and a few rodeo-riding friends decided to go out on the town one night. When one of his companions asked a woman to dance, Keith's friend received a classic rebuff. "She just looks at him and says, 'No way!'" Keith recalled to Paxman. "Then this guy in a cowboy hat swoops down on her, and he gets her to dance with him.... One of our other guys looks over and says, 'Hey, man, you should have been a cowboy.'" Hearing those words sent Keith running for pen and paper and the song was written in under a half hour. "I had the melody and everything at the same time," he recalled.

"Should've Been a Cowboy" was released as Keith's first single. Initial fears that the song would prove to be nothing more than a radio novelty song and merely sputter for a moment on the charts eventually ended: "Should've Been a Cowboy" made a slow, determined, five-month climb into the number-one spot; the album's other top-ten hits, like "Wish I Didn't Know Now" and "He Ain't Worth Missin'," added the energy to push Toby Keith all the way to platinum. Keith would score a total of four songs in the top ten, thanks in part to his determination, which was reflected by a heavy touring schedule that kept the singer away from his wife and two daughters throughout most of 1993. "Should've Been a Cowboy" had yet another incarnation: as the adopted anthem of the Dallas Cowboys Football League, thereby drawing Keith's past—as a football player and self-professed "cowboy"—in line with his future as a country music recording artist.

Christmas Songs

While achieving a more modest success than its predecessor, Keith's 1994 album, Boomtown, went gold with hits like "You Ain't Much Fun" and the poignant "Who's That Man. " As the album's first single, "Who's That Man" moved comfortably into the number-one spot on the country charts. Again writing or cowriting most of the songs on the album, with Boomtown Keith proved that he was more than a one-album artist. While noting that Keith's talents were not of the same caliber as those of the singer's idol, Haggard, or, superstar Randy Travis, Bob Allen observed in a review for Country Music that, with Boomtown, Keith "seems like a grizzled musical genius when measured against the flock of baby-faced teenyboppers in cowboy hats who've recently stormed the country charts."

In addition to Toby Keith and Boomtown, Keith has also released a collection of holiday-inspired songs under the title Christmas to Christmas. This collection of twelve non-traditional songs center around themes of love, caring, and the spirit of giving; the 1995 effort includes four tunes written or co-written by the singer and the songs run an emotional gamut from the honky-tonk "Santa's Gonna Take It All Back" to the poignant "Mary, It's Christmas." "It doesn't have any traditional Christmas songs on it," Keith explained in a Polydor press release, noting the album's unique approach to the "Christmas album" genre. "Instead of this just being a Christmas album, I wanted this to be an album like I usually do, but with a Christmas theme," the singer/songwriter adds. "This sounds likeanything else of mine that you would hear on the radio. It just happens to be about Christmas."

—Pamela Shelton