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 website, which mentioned that he handed “peacefully” surrounded by his household.
The singer introduced in the summertime of 2022 that he had been recognized with stomach cancer and was being handled with chemotherapy, radiation and surgical procedure.
In a latest interview with KWTV News 9, an Oklahoma-based TV station, Mr. Keith, who performed a run of exhibits in Las Vegas in December, mentioned he was nonetheless in remedy. “Cancer is a rollercoaster,” he mentioned. “You just sit here and wait on it to go away — it may not ever go away.” Keith mentioned that his Christian religion was serving to him get by means of the remedy and the potential darkish consequence.
Singing in an alternately declamatory and crooning baritone, Mr. Keith cultivated a boisterous, in-your-face persona with recordings like “I Wanna Talk About Me” and “Beer for My Horses.”
Constructed round intelligent wordplay and droll humor — and greater than somewhat 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 help his younger household.
“I didn’t take many vacations the first 20 years of my adult life,” Mr. Keith mentioned in a 2018 episode of The Massive Interview with Dan Quite.
“When I came out and my song hit,” he added, referring to “Should Have Been a Cowboy,” his first No. 1 nation single, in 1993, “I was doing 28, 29 shows a month because I didn’t know I was going to get a second hit.”
“At the time I was just trying to outwork everybody.”
