Just Announced: Toby Keith, John Anderson, and guitarist James Burton are joining the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Election to the Country Music Hall of Fame is country music’s highest honor, and new members are elected annually by an anonymous panel of industry leaders chosen by the Country Music Association (CMA).

Congratulations to the new members-elect who will be inducted during this year’s Medallion Ceremony on October 20.

Few artists have had as big of a career as Toby Keith. Outspoken and self-confident, Keith knew what he had, even when others didn’t recognize it. Every time someone undervalued him or sold him short, he turned the slight into motivation and creative fuel for a career that ranks with Country’s greatest.

Born July 8, 1961, Toby Keith Covel grew up in a small town outside of Oklahoma City, the son of a second-generation oil-field roughneck. Keith’s grandmother ran a supper club near the Oklahoma-Arkansas state line. When young Keith visited in the summer, he excitedly watched the club’s musicians on the stage as he worked from the back. Having learned to play guitar on an instrument his grandmother had bought him at a local OTASCO store, he occasionally got to sit in. When he got older, he toured regionally with his band, Easy Money.

Young Keith admired artists who could also write their songs, whether in Country (Merle Haggard) or rock (Bob Seger). As he began writing his own, he figured if he couldn’t make it as a singer, the songs were good enough to give him a career.

Not everyone agreed. When he first came to Nashville with a cassette of what he considered his six best songs (out of hundreds he had written), one label head told him he sang well enough but that those songs weren’t going to cut it. Keith returned to Oklahoma, dejected, determined, and hard-headed not to return.

Fortunately, Mercury Records Nashville head Harold Shedd heard about Keith and traveled to Oklahoma City to see him on his home turf. Shedd signed Keith to Mercury the next day. He also wanted to record all the songs on that cassette. They included three of his first four singles — the chart-topping hits “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” and “Wish I Didn’t Know Now,” as well as “He Ain’t Worth Missing” which went Top 5. A fourth song from the cassette, “Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You,” reached No. 1 when it was released on Keith’s 1996’s album Blue Moon.

“Should’ve Been a Cowboy” gave Keith a No. 1 out of the gate and began a string of hits that would continue across four decades. Keith reached No. 1 on the Country singles charts 32 times, writing or co-writing 26 of those songs.

Despite Keith having four No. 1 hits and one Top 5 with his first five singles, including “Who’s That Man” which he wrote by himself, Mercury shuffled the singer from label to label during his time there, first to Polydor, then to A&M, then back to Mercury, and Keith grew increasingly frustrated. When Mercury turned down his fifth album, which Keith was confident was the best he’d ever made, he asked the label to release him from his contract. Keith paid Mercury for the album, then promptly took it to the recently launched DreamWorks Nashville, which was being run by his producer James Stroud.

The album’s first single, “How Do You Like Me Now?!” spent five weeks at No. 1. DreamWorks allowed Keith to “dress out of his own closet” musically, and his greatest commercial successes at that time came during his years with the label. His five DreamWorks albums all went multi-Platinum, with 2002’s Unleashed and 2003’s Shock’n Y’all reaching 5x Platinum. Songs like “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This,” “I Love This Bar,” and “American Soldier” spent multiple weeks atop the charts.

While “As Good As I Once Was” and a duet with Willie Nelson called “Beer for My Horses” each spent six weeks at No. 1.

Another song, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” was written about how his dad would have felt when terrorists tore down the buildings on September 11, 2001, and initially used by the Marine Corps as motivation for the U.S. military invading Afghanistan. When the song took on a life beyond the military, Keith, who viewed himself as patriotic but not particularly political, became a cultural lightning rod. Many people tried to portray him as a one-dimensional character, but anyone who knew Keith knew he wouldn’t be limited to that. Keith didn’t write so much about politics as he wrote about communities — the communities found in the military, in bars, in bands that traveled the highways together. He performed on 11 U.S.O. tours, playing more than 200 shows for members of the U.S. Armed Forces.

In 2005, Keith launched his own label, Show Dog Records. He would pursue his musical vision there for the rest of his life, releasing hits like “Get Drunk and Be Somebody,” “American Ride,” “Red Solo Cup,” “Hope on the Rocks,” “Made In America,” “God Love Her,” and “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” which he wrote after being inspired by Clint Eastwood who later featured it in his 2018 film “The Mule.”

Keith nearly missed his induction into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2007 when his son’s football team, which he coached, took their championship game into multiple overtimes. He went into the New York based all-genre Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2021. Keith also received the National Medal of the Arts in 2020 and the BMI Icon Award in 2022, among several other industry awards and honors.

Keith was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2021 and died on February 5, 2024, at age 62. In an on-air eulogy on his late-night talk show, longtime friend Stephen Colbert, confessed that he, too, had once underestimated Keith. “Toby was always surprising people,” he said. “Toby taught me not to prejudge a guest and to have my intention, but to keep my eyes open to the reality of who they are. For that lesson, and for a lot of other things, I’m always going to be grateful.”

What’s not a surprise, though, is Keith’s selection to the Country Music Hall of Fame. The man who once sang that he “dreamed about living in your radio” has found a permanent home in the Hall of Fame Rotunda.

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