Music Bloodline

Toby Keith

Immensely popular and outspoken contemporary honky-tonk singer with complicated politics that recall Merle Haggard.

Biography

Toby Keith spent the '90s as a country star with considerable chart success, yet he never quite became a household name. That changed in 2002 when he recorded "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)," a response to September 11 that became one of country's most highly charged political statements since Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." The media furor ensured that even people with no knowledge of country music still knew him as "the guy with the 'boot in the ass' song," and helped make Keith a phenomenon. Yet he'd been recording for nearly a decade prior and already had several chart-topping country singles to his credit. ~ Steve Huey