Toby Keith talks Country Thunder, Bus Songs, supporting the troops and Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue

It's World Poetry Day when Toby Keith checks in by phone to talk about the Should've Been a Cowboy XXV Tour, which makes it way to Arizona just in time for Country Thunder.

The tour takes its name from the 25th anniversary of "Should've Been a Cowboy," the Oklahoma native's breakthrough single, which went on to be the most-played country record of the '90s.

The conversation touches on a number of the highlights of the singer's 25-year run, from that first hit to being honored last year with the Poets Awards from the Academy of Country Music.

It hasn't always been a smooth ride and it also touches on some of those speed bumps, including the backlash he faced in the wake of responding to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 with "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)."

That single topped the country charts and inspired a feud with the Dixie Chicks, who took exception to lines as confrontational as "You'll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A / 'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass / It's the American way."

Toby Keith, award-winning poet

Question: I happened to notice as I was getting my questions together that the top trending item on Twitter was World Poetry Day, so Happy Poetry Day. I know you were honored last year with the Poets Award from the Academy of Country Music.

Answer: (Laughs) Yeah, you know if I had told my dad in grade school that I was gonna grow up and be a poet instead of working in the oil field, he would’ve smashed me right upside the head. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “I want to be a poet.”

Q: How did it feel, then, to be honored as a poet?

A: When I hit my stride and it started to happen, that meant more to me than anything. Because if I wouldn’t have had a recording contract to sing, I would’ve been writing songs. It didn’t matter. I just happened to be the vehicle.

It didn’t change anything other than that I then had a place to go with my songs, for me to sing them. So I was a writer whether I made it or not.

Toby hits Nashville

Q: Was that the goal when you first moved to Nashville, to be a writer? Or was the goal to sing your own songs?

A: The goal was to succeed and give yourself a shot at being able to make a living doing this, you know? Because the more financially stable you are, the more time you can spend on it.

If you’re working a day job and a night job, it’s hard to write and feed your family. But if you’re making enough at doing this to where you can do this all the time, you can obviously have a lot more shots at it.

But the goal at first was just to find out what was out there for me. You don’t know coming out of Oklahoma where you stand in the big picture of what people think. We didn’t have the Internet and YouTube when I started.

The best thing about the Internet is everybody gets to be heard and the worst thing about the internet is everybody gets to be heard (laughs). We didn’t have any of that. So we just had to go through the normal filters, you know?

Go try to get somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody to listen to it and then you’ve gotta evaluate how good that person’s opinion is.

Capitol Records doesn't hear a hit

Q: Were the opinions what you were hoping to hear right away when you moved there?

A: The first big opinion I got, I just had a gut feeling it wasn’t an honest opinion. They said, “You’re not a very good writer and we already have singers as good as you, so maybe you need to go back and woodshed.”

But of the five or six songs I turned into Capitol, three of them were No. 1s, one was a Top 5 and two of them I recorded on my first album. So I had a feeling that they just took the meeting as a courtesy.

And it didn’t discourage me. I already had those songs and played them in the nightclubs for a couple years and they were getting requested, so I knew they weren’t that bad of songs.

Q: Did you ever have an opportunity to run into that person after you had made it?

A: Oh yeah. I run into him. But he was just a person taking a meeting. Last I heard he was running a lawn care service. He wasn’t even in the music business. So I don’t have any ill feelings toward him. I would buy him a beer just for making me work harder.

I was like, “I’ll show you.”

Q: You said “When I hit my stride….” When do you think that was?

A: At first, you don’t know where you fit. Are you a bar singer? Are you gonna write songs?

Are you gonna have a couple artists that record your songs, like most people do, or are you gonna find one of those guys and he’s gonna cut all your songs, like Strait did for Dean Dillon? Are you that guy?

Are you gonna be an artist? Are you just gonna go all over town to pitch songs? Are you gonna do it from Nashville? Are you gonna do it from Oklahoma?

Once I got signed, Harold Shedd said, “We’re doing your songs on your albums with you singing them and you are the artist. You’re a singer-songwriter.” Then I didn’t have to worry about all the different directions you can go. I just focused in on writing for me.

Over 25 years, I’ve cut a handful of outside songs but they really had to fit what we were doing. I’m not gonna cut a song just because somebody says it’s a hit.

If it sounds like me and I know I can deliver it, then once every two or three albums, I pick one out and say “I’m gonna cut this.”

Once he told me “You have to have songs ready for every album and they’re gonna keep coming every year,” well, then I had my marching orders, you know? And that’s what I do.

Should've Been a Cowboy at 25

Q: You’re about to launch your Should’ve Been a Cowboy XXV Tour to honor the 25th anniversary of that song.

A: That was the first one and it’s still the most important one, looking back, because of the great artists I’ve seen come and go that were really talented that never did make it and then they turned around and wrote hits for other people.

But because their first one or two didn’t go out of the big box, they moved on. Nashville’s really finicky. You have a hit when you come out, you’ll be the flavor of the month. And then they’ll give you another chance because you proved you can do it.

But if you struggle a little bit in your first two or three singles, they’ve got another guy or girl standing right behind you ready to hit the radio station. So “Cowboy” put that foundation down. It was so big that I had four or five chances to screw up.

Q: What do you recall of the writing of that song?

A: I was in Kansas with about 20 guys, a couple highway patrolmen, my manager at the time, his bar buddies, and they said “We’re going pheasant hunting.” So we loaded up one morning and took off.

And when we got back to Dodge City that night, we went in our hunting clothes and found a little steakhouse.

Everything in that town was themed after “Gunsmoke.” The steakhouse we were in, I think was called the Long Branch, which is off “Gunsmoke.” Dodge City is one of the most famous Western historical towns. So I was taking it all in.

And one night, we were eating in our hunting clothes and one of the highway patrolmen, an older cat, got up and asked this cowgirl to dance and she shot him down. Everybody was making fun of him when he walked back to the table.

He said, “I’ll get her before the night is over.” And then a young cowboy come in there and took her to the dance floor. She jumped right into his arms. And one of those cats said, “Hey John, you shoulda been a cowboy.”

I just went, “I’m writing that song tonight.” So I went back and thought about it, sat in the hotel room and I thought Marshal Dillon never had to work that hard at Miss Kitty. She chased him on every show. He just never hung his hat up at her house.

And I wrote it in about 20 minutes. That’s the whole story.

Q: That song obviously launched your career. How did it feel to watch it make its way to No. 1?

A: I was in Nashville one week and the charts were reported on Monday.

The radio stations would turn in their playlists with how many times they planned to play it in the coming week. And you would either get added or taken off and there were different levels of medium spin, heavy spin and light spin.

I was a new artist so nobody knew me. And I was at No. 28 for four weeks. It wouldn’t go anywhere. And I remember Anne Weaver sitting at the desk. I was in the promotion office, going, “Are we gonna lose this record?”

She goes, “If we stay 28 again, we’re gonna lose this record.” I go, “Where are we right now?” And she goes “We’re at 28, but I’ve still got five stations to report here in the next half hour.” And all of them came in as either add or medium or heavy spin.

It just took off. We were right on the breaking point. And we were blessed that it rocked right on through.

How Do You Like Me Now?

Q: Was there a certain number of hits that you got to where you were like, “All right, I’ve got this down?”

A: I think after my second album, I knew I’d be set. I didn’t know if that meant set forever. But I knew I had the foundation that I could go work for at least another four or five years if nothing else happened.

And I had four or five No. 1s. I got on the Reba tour. She had a huge tour that year and I got the middle act on that deal. And then I had a couple more hits.

But I got in a spot with my record label. The guy who signed me retired. So another guy came in and we didn’t see eye to eye. It wasn’t just because he was shorter than me either. (laughs)

I told him, “You either put this music out or drop me.” He said “Well, we’ve never dropped anybody.” I said, “You’re just gonna shelve me and not allow anybody to have me but you’re not gonna put my music out?” He said, “That’s the way we do it.”

I said, “You’re not gonna let me provide for my family because you don’t think my music’s working and I’ve got more No. 1s than you.” He finally said, “If you want to be dropped, you can be dropped.” So he dropped me.

I said “What about my album?” He said, “What about it?” I said, “Y’all hate it” and he said “We do.” I said “Can I buy it?” He said, “Let me ask.” He called New York and they said “Yep.”

I gave them $220,000, took it over to Dreamworks and sold it to them for a million and had Album of the Year. That was “How Do You Like Me Now. ” When that came out, I went straight to headlining.

Country Thunder

Q: You’re gonna be here for the Country Thunder Festival and I know it’s not your first time. Do you have any favorite memories of that festival?

A: You know what? Believe it or not, those festivals are so alike, they all just look the same to me. We come in focused and know what our job is and we just try to get the audience to go with us, you know?

Q: Do you approach a festival gig any differently than you approach a festival show?

A: No. It’s just go out there and hammer down.

Some of our tailgaters are out there at 1, 2 o’clock in the afternoon and they’re drinking ’til 9. They don’t even really get into the venue until 7:30. They’re out there 5, 6, 7 hours drinking. Then they come inside and it’s just crazy.

The Bus Songs

Q: Last year, you did a record called “The Bus Songs.” Could you talk a bit about the inspiration for that album?

A: Well, as you write through the years, you’ve got all kinds of things you write. You’re using your creative thoughts to write whatever’s in front of you.

So if somebody says something crazy, the next thing you know, you’re writing a song and you know the radio will never play that. But you write it for fun. And we wrote 50 or 60 of those kind of ditties.

But some of ‘em are so politically incorrect, some of ‘em are so dirty, some of ‘em are so stupid, it’s like you can never play this, really, in front of anybody. This is just a couple guys or a guy and a girl, whoever, writing, having fun with it. It’s really just for you.

Over the years, we just had ‘em laying around and my manager and agent came in and said “You play these songs on USO Tours and these people love them. You play at golf events and people love 'S—ty Golfer.' You ought to put them on a compilation where people that like ‘em can get ‘em all."

We were between albums and they were already recorded so I didn’t have to do anything. We went and threw it out as just a sidebar.

The USO Tours

Q: You mentioned doing USO Tours. What impact do you think that has had on you as an entertainer and an artist?

A: I’m so blessed that that was my way of giving back. It was my full intention of only doing it for a year or two. And the USO convinced me.

They said “You guys get it and you really understand the mission we’re trying to accomplish here. And you fill a huge void.”

It’s not like the old days when Bob Hope went out and it was cool for everyone to go. If Ann-Margaret and the Playboy bunnies and Tony Bennett and all those guys went on the USO Tour, it was great.

You go on the USO Tour today and you’re just gonna get hammered in the media and get all the checkmarks on the right side from all the bloggers and the haters.

Q: For playing a USO Tour??!!

A: Oh yeah. You support the military, you voted right-wing your whole life.

Q: I knew you got grief for doing the Donald Trump inauguration last year. But I didn’t know you got grief for the USO shows.

A: Yeah, but you know what? I didn’t get grief for playing the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama. The people writing, as long as it’s their guy, it’s OK. When it isn’t their guy, you’re the a--hole. You just have to learn to live with that.

But I saw that void. They said “It’s really difficult for us to get anybody to do these USO Tours.” There’s a little bit of a fear factor. I get that. And then there’s a career factor, where people don’t want to be associated with it.

In 25 years, I’ve had 30 artists refuse to work on projects if I was on them.

Q: Really?

A: Oh yeah. I mean, it didn’t stop me. I did 11 years of 240-some shows. Once I saw that void, I didn’t care about the grief I took. If they want me, I’m going.

The military has been really good to me. They don’t get drafted by the government. They volunteer. And when the government asks them to go do something, they go. I have tremendous respect and admiration for their valor and they left a mark on me.

So the rest of that stuff doesn’t matter.

Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue

Q: It’s interesting that people would refuse to work with you.

A: I’ve never been political. I thought it was cool to support the military. I had “60 Minutes” after me, Fox News and CNN. I had these crazy bloggers making stuff up. It was like “What did I do to deserve this?”

You can’t go out and support the military in Afghanistan or you get all the right-wing checkmarks that come with it. I was like, “Well, I’m just gonna take ‘em. Mark me down. Just check me off however you want to check me off.”

It never did stop me. And it never did dishearten me. I was just in a world of going “What the f--k?” (laughs) “What is this about?” Part of it is because you’re rich and famous, too?

Q: Was part of it because of “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue?”

A: I’m sure it is. But “American Soldier” got as much grief as that did. “Beer for My Horses” got a lot of grief and it was just a Western toast.

You know, people are gonna hate and you’ve just gotta let it roll. I just don’t ask anybody I don’t know to do anything with me.

I do a big thing for the Children’s Cancer Family Center in Oklahoma City and a lot of celebrities come in. We raise about a million six or seven in a one-night auction at the casino and then golf the next day at my golf course.

I built this thing. It took me about 10 years. I have a lot of celebrities come in and I could ask a lot more but if I don’t know you, I don’t ask you.

You won’t believe how many times about 15 years ago, when I first started doing USO Tours and “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue” came out, you’d walk up to somebody and you’d say “Hi” and they would go, “No, no, no, no. We’re not doing this.”

And I’d be like, “What for? What’s up?” “Oh, you’re politically different than I am. I can’t work with you.” So I quit asking. I just went and did it myself.

Q: Do you feel like that has had an impact on your career.

A: No. (Pause). No. I don’t know how it would have impacted it. I didn’t do anything different. They asked me to put an album out every year. Most people don’t do that. I’m approaching 100 million spins as a songwriter. A lot of people haven’t been able to do that. I’m in the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. My crew and my band have been with me forever. You just trust the ones around you and let the idiots go be idiots.

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley.

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Country Thunder Headliner Giveaway

Want to sit on stage during Cole Swindell’s Thursday night headlining performance? Dying to meet Luke Bryan and get your picture taken with the two-time Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year?

The Arizona Republic| azcentral.com are offering four lucky fans this unique opportunity at this year’s Country Thunder event.

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Official rules are provided below.

COUNTRY THUNDER COUNTRY STAR GIVEAWAY OFFICIAL RULES

Eligibility: Subject to the additional restrictions below, the Country Thunder Headliner Giveaway (the “Sweepstakes”) is open to Arizona residents who are 18 years or older at the time of entry. Employees and contractors of Gannett Co., Inc., and each of its respective affiliated companies, and advertising and promotional agencies, and the immediate family members of, and any persons domiciled with, any such employees or contractors, are not eligible to enter or to win.

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Sponsor: The Country Thunder Country Star Giveaway is sponsored by The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. The decisions of Sponsor regarding the selection of winners and all other aspects of the Sweepstakes shall be final and binding in all respects. Sponsor will not be responsible for typographical, printing or other inadvertent errors in these Official Rules or in other materials relating to the Sweepstakes.