Track 4 from Blue Moon (1996)

Track 5 from Dream Walkin' (1997)

I've made lists of my favorite country singles of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, and Toby Keith is the artist who has the most significant presence across all three of those lists. He had a really impressive hitmaking run, 20 #1s over 20 years with a long tail of minor hits, and unlike a lot of his contemporaries, wrote most of his hits (the only one he didn't that I'd really put among his very best is "My List"). He was pretty successful in the '90s, but he didn't really become a superstar with crossover recognition until, as I wrote in one of those lists, "How Do You Like Me Now?!" and some other songs with a bigger personality "transformed him from a normal macho country singer to some kind of strutting Johnny Bravo-style caricature of raging id." 

Of course, what really propelled Toby Keith to mainstream fame was the jingoistic post-9/11 anthem "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)," which turned him into a flag-waving mascot for the George W. Bush administration and the general right wing ugliness of the George W. Bush era. And that's the complicated legacy that a lot of people have focused on this week, but that was really a very small part of his catalog. he had dozens of hits and only one or two others remotely as political. I heard "Courtesy" twice on the radio and a third time from a passing car on Tuesday after the new of Keith's passing broke, but I can barely remember the last time I'd heard the song before that. Usually when I hear Toby Keith on the radio, it's "As Good As I Once Was" or "God Love Her" or "I Love This Bar," and I crank those songs up every time. 

Keith's willingness to play the pro-war heel made him a pretty divisive figure, and he got plenty of bad press. He responded to that on Shock'n Y'all with "The Critic." And as a music critic, I don't really take offense at him stereotyping us as underpaid losers and failed musicians (guilty as charged), he was just joking around. Shock'n Y'All also featuring two live bonus tracks, labeled "bus songs" on the back cover of the album, because they were more playful 'adult' songs that Keith and his band enjoyed playing on the tour bus that weren't necessarily ready for commercial radio. One of those tracks, "Weed With Willie," was the most significant non-single in Keith's live repertoire, and it was one of the songs reprised when he released The Bus Songs in 2017, along with "The Critic" and "The Ballad Of Balad" and "Get Out Of My Car." 

I tried to pick songs that really showed Keith's range, though. The guitar leads on "She Only Gets That Way With Me," the tempo changes on "You Ain't Leavin' (Thank God Are Ya)," the wit of "I Can't Take You Anywhere," the vulnerability of "The Lonely." Several of these songs could have been huge hits if they were released as singles, especially "Grain Of Salt." And Keith's final album featured a cover of one of my favorite John Prine deep cuts after Prine's death. 

On Tuesday, I tweeted a story from Marc Eliot's Merle Haggard bio The Hag from about a decade after Keith and Haggard recorded "She Ain't Hooked On Me No More" together. Two months before Haggard died in 2016, he was still trying to soldier on and play concerts, and at his second-to-last show in Vegas, Toby Keith stopped by to say hello. Haggard asked him to be ready to step in, and after four songs he couldn't continue, so Toby Keith came out and sang Haggard's songs for him for the rest of the show. I think that's a great testament to Keith's real legacy, his talent and his knowledge of country history and his willingness to step up at a moment's notice, that's how I wanna remember him.