Toby Keith, the larger-than-life singer-songwriter of No. 1 nation hits like “Who’s Your Daddy?” and “Made in America” and one of many greatest stars to return out of Nashville in three a long time, died on Monday. He was 62.
His dying was introduced on his official web site, which mentioned that he handed “peacefully” surrounded by his household.
The singer introduced in the summertime of 2022 that he had been identified with abdomen most cancers and was being handled with chemotherapy, radiation and surgical procedure.
In a current interview with KWTV Information 9, an Oklahoma-based TV station, Mr. Keith, who performed a run of reveals in Las Vegas in December, mentioned he was nonetheless in remedy. “Most cancers is a rollercoaster,” he mentioned. “You simply sit right here and wait on it to go away — it could not ever go away.” Keith mentioned that his Christian religion was serving to him get via the remedy and the potential darkish final result.
Singing in an alternately declamatory and crooning baritone, Mr. Keith cultivated a boisterous, in-your-face persona with recordings like “I Wanna Discuss About Me” and “Beer for My Horses.”
Constructed round intelligent wordplay and droll humor — and greater than a little bit macho bluster — each topped the nation chart, with “Beer for My Horses,” a twangy, Rolling Stones-style rocker that includes Willie Nelson on vocals, crossing over to the pop Prime 40.
Mr. Keith wrote or co-wrote most of his materials, which ranged stylistically from conventional honky-tonk to pop-country balladry and Southern rock. Greater than 60 of his singles reached the nation chart, together with 20 No. 1 hits, and he offered greater than 40 million albums worldwide. In 2015 he was inducted into the Songwriters Corridor of Fame in a category with Cyndi Lauper, the blues pioneer Willie Dixon, and Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Useless.
Mr. Keith was already in his 30s, having scuffled for years to make it within the music enterprise, when he signed his first file deal in 1993. He had beforehand labored as a rodeo hand, a roughneck within the Oklahoma oil fields and as a semiprofessional soccer participant to assist his younger household.
“I didn’t take many holidays the primary 20 years of my grownup life,” Mr. Keith mentioned in a 2018 episode of The Massive Interview with Dan Fairly.
“After I got here out and my music hit,” he added, referring to “Ought to Have Been a Cowboy,” his first No. 1 nation single, in 1993, “I used to be doing 28, 29 reveals a month as a result of I didn’t know I used to be going to get a second hit.”
“On the time I used to be simply making an attempt to outwork everyone.”
