Toby Keith estimates that, all told, it took him about twenty minutes to write the best-known hit of his career. "I was working out at the time," the country singer recalls.

It was the fall of 2001, a few weeks after September 11th, and six months after Keith's father, an Army veteran, had been killed in a hit-and-run accident. "I guarantee you," Keith says, "my dad would have been a lot more hard-core than me. I thought about how angry he would have been -- how he'd have said we didn't learn enough from Pearl Harbor. Then I just told my story."

Keith's story became "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)," an unapologetically pissed-off, and at times patently jingoistic, response to what Keith refers to as "nine-one-one." The Rising it isn't. With lyrics such as "You'll be sorry you messed with the U.S. of A./'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American way," Keith did not risk losing any listeners with an overly subtle message. And the message turned out to be one that plenty of people wanted to hear. "Red, White and Blue" propelled Keith's eighth album, Unleashed, to the top of the pop charts in 2002, giving a man who'd been largely unknown outside the world of country a brand-new title: America's favorite redneck.

Keith went on to perform for the president, feud with the Dixie Chicks and duet with Willie Nelson. That duet, "Beer for My Horses," staked out a position many might assume to be unpopular -- hey, let's lynch the bad guys! -- but the song topped the country charts. (Sample lyrics: "Take all the rope in Texas/Find a tall oak tree/Round up all of them bad boys/Hang them high in the street for all the people to see. . . .") The title of Keith's latest release, Shock'N Y'all, may be the worst pun in human history, but the album debuted in November at Number One, selling close to 600,000 copies and displacing OutKast at the top of the charts.

In person, Keith -- who played defensive end for the Oklahoma City Drillers, a semipro football team, for two years before turning to music -- is an imposing figure. When we meet at his new home in Norman, about a half-hour from downtown Oklahoma City, he's wearing a University of Oklahoma baseball cap, a hooded sweat shirt, blue skater shorts and new-looking slipper-sneakers without laces or socks. His legs are skinny and practically hairless, but everything else about the six-foot-four Keith exudes brawn. You might call him baby-faced if not for the sandy stubble and the baritone drawl. He seems relaxed -- he's technically on vacation, just off a tour -- but also a bit suspicious of his visitor. Though he's casually welcoming and chews gum throughout our conversation, his blue eyes rarely make contact with mine, and he seems to be on guard for any manner of attack, his demeanor falling somewhere between weary and irritated.

As for the house, may we interrupt to make a brief suggestion to MTV: Please consider this guy for an episode of Cribs. Keith has been working on his home for the past three years, and he had just moved in two weeks earlier with his wife, Tricia, and their three kids. The house sits on 160 acres of land. The main room has a forty-foot ceiling. Most of the surfaces in this room are marble. There are also four enormous indoor columns, a spiral staircase and an ornate chandelier. Meanwhile, the home theater has a domed ceiling that's covered with a mural (of painted ivy) and actual blinking star lights. When we enter Keith's wood-paneled office, he says, "Look up. See that ceiling? Alligator skin." He is not kidding. The only disappointment on the tour comes when Keith cannot figure out how to fire up the outdoor waterfall.

We sit down to talk at an enormous round table with zebra-print place mats and massive throne chairs. Keith grew up about four miles from here, and he doesn't envision himself ever living elsewhere. Locals follow rodeo and college football, and they fish for sand bass every spring in a river that runs through Keith's property. Keith himself did all of that while growing up. He also got his first guitar (from his maternal grandmother) when he was eight, for Christmas. His paternal grandfather, who played music in church, taught him a few chords, but he didn't start really practicing until he was a teenager. Some older kids had a weekly jam session at their apartment. Keith started dropping by and was inspired to write his own songs. "I saw all these people sitting around captivated by hearing something original," he says, "and I thought, 'What if they were hearing something good?' " He soon began writing eight or nine songs a day. "So you know they sucked," he says. "But every last idea I had, I finished."

Keith was noticed without ever moving to Nashville, and he released his debut in 1993. He had hits in the country world but didn't really break through in a big way until the rowdy 1999 single "How Do You Like Me Now?" Like "Red, White and Blue," the song, musically, was strictly standard-issue twang, with Keith's ornery lyrics setting it apart. He seems to have inherited his lip from his late father, who worked his way up from oil-field "roughneck" to regional manager. "He was like John Wayne," Keith says. "He lost his eye in a jeep accident. Went through a windshield. But he never bitched about it. I was sixteen or seventeen before I knew that discolored eye was blind."

Keith was about to perform at a casino in Wisconsin when he received word of his father's death. He went on anyway. "It was a no-brainer," he says. "My dad would've disowned me. He used to come out with us so much, he was like our mascot. Everyone in the band was falling apart. I said, 'I've got time to grieve at home. We're thirty minutes from going on with a house full of people. He knows there's nothing we can do for him now.' We sucked it up and went on."

The following January, Keith recorded Unleashed in Miami. "Red, White and Blue" wasn't even considered for the album. But a few months later, during a show at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he played the song live, as a gift to the troops. The band didn't know the music, so Keith played it solo. The room went silent, then, when he hit the chorus, broke into a roar.

Keith talked to his manager about including the song on the album. "I'm very prayer-driven," Keith says. "I feel like things happen for a reason. But the realistic . . . not realistic, the earthly side of me said, 'This song's gonna rub a lot of people the wrong way.' So I had to weigh the two sides. Are you willing to fuss and fight with people so other people who need to hear the song can hear it?

"It sucks ass that I have to defend myself for being patriotic," he continues. "Looking back, I'm glad I did it. I'm not saying every time we disagree with somebody we should go to war. But they attacked us. We knew who did it. We had to stop them from doing it again. For me, it's like sticking your head in the sand if you criticize my song. They said, 'You should have more tact.' There's nothing tactful about war. There's nothing tactful about flying a plane into a building. You don't have to have more tact."

Those who found Keith in need of a tact injection were likely disappointed with Shock'N Y'all, the back cover of which features the black-clad singer and his bulldog calmly watching what appears to be a Fourth of July fireworks display over a Middle Eastern skyline. Though the lead single is the good-timey drinking song "I Love This Bar," other tracks include "American Soldier" and "The Taliban Song," the latter written from the point of view of an Afghan man applauding the U.S. bombing of Taliban positions. Earlier last year, Keith seemed to back away from his hard-line image, telling the Los Angeles Times that he thought "the math hasn't worked out for me" for the Iraq invasion, but now he insists the quote was taken out of context. "People are saying I'm trying to save my career," Keith says angrily. "I'm 150 percent pro-troop. I said the math doesn't add up for me, but the people in charge are smarter than me, and they're not gonna call me up and tell me certain things. I'm not gonna trust the guy on the corner of Hollywood and Vine holding a 'Peace, Not War' sign. He don't know more than I do. I'm gonna trust Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld more than somebody who just made a movie."

But as a devil's advocate might ask, isn't the problem that the people in charge did say the reason we were invading was weapons of mass destruction, and they haven't found any? Keith shrugs. "Bush can't just pull the trigger on a war by himself. He convinced enough people to go along with him. Either way, I feel much safer in the world than I did two years ago.

"My dad always told me, the higher up the flagpole you climb, the more people see your ass and the bigger target you make," Keith continues. While he declines to talk about the Dixie Chicks (whose singer Natalie Maines at one point sported a f.u.t.k. T-shirt) specifically, he will say, "It used to be taboo to talk about other artists in Nashville. You didn't hear Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash talk about Merle Haggard when he did 'Fightin' Side of Me' or 'Okie From Muskogee,' " a pair of right-wing country hits from the Vietnam era.

Despite all his success, Keith obviously carries a chip on his shoulder, railing against his critics and insisting that he's never been accepted by Nashville. "I didn't come out as some pumped-up industry cat," he says. "I kicked around with seven albums on five different labels. I'm one-for-thirty-seven at the CMAs [Country Music Awards]. I never lived in Nashville for a day. When I wasn't selling, nobody bitched about me. Now that I paid my dues and broke through, everyone bitches."

[From Issue 940 — January 22, 2004]