Toby Keith’s sexy voice, choice of musical material and engaging personality combine to make Toby Keith tickets a gift prized by women all over the world. Not just another slick musician with a shiny hair and a whitened smile, Toby Keith sings about real life situations that almost all women can strongly relate to.
Born on July 8, 1961, Toby Keith is old enough to have developed a loyal following of women of his own generation as well as young enough to be appealing to their daughters and granddaughters. Growing up in Oklahoma, Keith first became interested in music while visiting an establishment called Billie Garner’s Supper Club that was owned by his grandmother in Fort Smith, Arkansas. While visiting her, he helped out by doing menial chores such as taking out the trash, doing the dinner dishes, clearing tables and sweeping and mopping the floors. He began performing with the musicians in the various bands that played there, and he received his first guitar as a gift when he was eight years old.
Keith excelled on the football field in high school when playing defensive end for Moore High School’s varsity team. Like many of his classmates, he sought and found work in the Oklahoma oil fields after high school graduation. Starting out as a derrick hand, he advanced to the position of operations manager by the time he had turned 20.
His first band, formed along with friends Danny Smith, Scott Web and Keith Cory, was called Easy Money and played in local bars. Still employed in the oil fields during this time, Keith often had to stop performing in the middle of a set when suddenly called back to work on the oil fields.
After finding himself unemployed in 1982 due to a substantial decline in oil field activity, Keith began playing semi-pro football with the Oklahoma City Drillers. He kept on performing with Easy Money, making the rounds of Oklahoma honky tonks with the band. Like many other country music hopefuls, he took his chances on Nashville in the early 1990s, distributing demo tapes to record labels and performing in establishments in the city’s Music Row. When there was no interest from any of the companies in his demo, a depressed Toby Keith returned home to Oklahoma.
However, when a flight attendant gave Mercury Records executive Harry Shedd a copy of Keth’s demo while he was a passenger on a flight she was working, the music career that Keith had always wanted quickly became a reality. His first hit song, “I Should Have Been a Cowboy,” was recorded in 1993 and his first album recorded under the Mercury label went platinum in that same year.
Toby Keith has never lost his average working-guy charm, though, and that’s probably why women of all ages continue to love his music and to relish the chance to be able to see him perform onstage. Even those who do not consider themselves to be country music fans can’t resist Toby Keith.
