Toby Keith Covel was born on July 8, 1961 in Clinton, Oklahoma. When Keith grew young, his family moved to Moore, Oklahoma. His grandmother was the owner of a supper club and Keith became interested in the musicians who came there to play. He got his first guitar when he was just 8 years old. Keith attended Moore High School where he played on the football team.Keith graduated from Moore High School .
He went to work as a derrick hand in the booming oil fields of Oklahoma in 1979. He soon became an operation manager due to his hard work.
Toby Keith was successful in forming the Easy Money Band at the age of 20. They played local bars as he continued to work in the oil industry. At times, he would have to leave in the middle of a gig if he was paged to work in the oil field.
Career
Keith went to Nashville, Tennessee in 1993. Keith hung out and busked on Music Row and at a place called Houndogs. He tried to contact many record companies in the city by distributing copies of a demo tape the band had made but all his efforts ended in smoke. He had no other option but to return home hopelessly.However, Toby Keith had promised himself to have a recording contract by the time he was 30 years old or give up on music as a career. He had already passed that age without any prospects for a recording contract.
Good luck happened to Keith when a flight attendant and one of his fan gave a copy of Keith’s demo tape to Harold Shedd, a Mercury Records executive, while he was traveling on a flight she was working. Shedd was impressed what she heard . She went to see Keith perform live and then signed him to a recording contract with Mercury.
His debut single, Should’ve Been a Cowboy (1993), proved to be a super hit. It went to number 1 on the Billboard country singles chart. Keith’s self-titled debut album was certified platinum. Other hit singles included A Little Less Talk And A Lot More Action and Wish I Didn’t Know Now.
Keith moved briefly to Polydor Records and released his next two albums Boomtown (1994) and Blue Moon (1996). The albums met with grand success. Boomtown went gold and Blue Moon was certified platinum.
Keith was also featured on the Beach Boys’ now out-of-print 1996 album Stars and Stripes Vol. 1 In 1996. He performed a cover of their 1963 hit Be True to Your School with the Beach Boys themselves providing the harmonies and backing vocals. Keith started working on his next album How Do You Like Me Now (1999) at Mercury but he could not continue with Mercury due to creative differences with Mercury. He purchased the rights to the album and moved to DreamWorks Nashville. The album went double platinum and the title song How Do You Like Me Now was a number 1 single for 5 weeks.
Keith also availed the opportunities of doing a series of television advertisements for Telecom USA for their discount long distance telephone service 10-10-220. Keith became a superstar and household name because of the ads and his latest hit album. Keith was also starred in Ford commercials, singing original songs such as Ford Truck Man, Field Trip (Look Again), and I Am a Workin’ Man, while driving Ford trucks. On June 19, 2002, Keith was appeared at the very first Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (then NWA-TNA) weekly pay-per-view.
Keith launched his own record label called Show Dog Nashville on August 31, 2005 after parting ways with Universal Music Group which had since bought DreamWorks. Its first release was Keith’s album White Trash With Money, followed by the soundtrack to Broken Bridges.
Keith filmed Broken Bridges in the Autumn of 2005. Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld were the writers and Steven Goldmann was the director of this film. This feature film from Paramount/CMT Films was released on September 8, 2006. Keith plays Bo Price, a country musician whose career has seen better times. Kelly Preston, Burt Reynolds, and Tess Harper are the leading stars in this movie.
Sponsored by Ford trucks, Keith is continuing his Hookin’ Up & Hangin’ Out Tour in Albany, New York, with guests Flynnville Train, Lindsey Haun, and Miranda Lambert.
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