Remembering Toby Keith: Our 2012 interview with the country music star before West Palm concert

Editor's note: Country music star Toby Keith died Feb. 5, 2024, following a battle with stomach cancer, at the age of 62. Here is our 2012 interview with Keith before his performance in West Palm Beach.

Before Brad Paisley said no, before Keith Urban was asked, Toby Keith turned down American Idol. They offered the 51-year-old Oklahoma native “a beaucoup-lot of money, a really big number,” Keith said by phone from Georgia.

“Ten years ago, I would have probably jumped on it but I’ve been around enough to know that I don’t have the energy to focus on something like that and I would want to do a great job. I’ve never seen the show, but I’ve done a couple of movies and it’s just really time-consuming.”

Not only would it take time from his touring schedule and his songwriting time, most importantly, it would take time away from his family.

The father of three married Tricia Lucus in 1984. She was a single mom and he adopted her daughter Shelley right after they married. He’s also the father of Krystal, a blossoming singer/songwriter, and Stelen, who Keith calls Steelman, who is in 10th grade.

Krystal recently spoke about her father to a California radio station saying, “My dad made sure that we didn’t notice when he was gone. He would always make time for us and was always there when we needed him.”

His marriage works, he says, because of his schedule. He teases his wife, saying, “If I retired, we might not get along. When I’m home all the time you might not be able to stand me.”

Getting serious, he says, “You just have to have the right people in the right situation. If you’ve been together for a long time and then you go on the road, I think that makes it harder. When we met, I was already busting my hump, working in the oil fields, so I was gone three or four days a week anyway. Then I switched to music and I was gone four or five nights at a time. There are a lot of sacrifices and I’m sure she felt them. If you can stay together through that, when the good times come, it’s so rewarding.”

These days, Keith’s touring schedule has been pared back. “Now I only do about 65 shows a year, and even during my heaviest three or four months of touring, I’m home Monday through Thursday afternoon at about 2 o’clock. Steelman gets up to go to school, I’ll see him off and that afternoon I pop over to the airport, fly to my show that night. I ride my bus a couple of nights, do my three shows, and as soon as the last show’s over I race to the closest airport and jump back on the plane and head back to my house. I wake up Sunday morning back at home.”

When Keith’s at home, one of his greatest joys is coaching his son’s football team. Keith, who played semi-pro football for the Oklahoma City Drillers in the early ‘80s, was invited to be an assistant coach at his son’s school, a role he relishes.

“It’s neat to be able to keep going with him. Even during my work season, I’ll be at practice Monday through Wednesday. I only have about 8 shows left and then I’ll be completely off the road. I usually work until October but I’ve pushed everything forward so I can experience his high school football years. That is such a big chunk of my world.”

Part of the reason Keith likes to stay close to home is that he knows that the life you see around you shapes the life you chase. He has always credited the time he spent with his maternal grandmother with fueling his passion for music. It was in her tavern that Keith, age 12, was introduced to the honkytonk way of life. He wrote about it in Honkytonk U and again in Clancy’s Tavern, his 2011 album.

Hilda Marie ‘Clancy’ Martin of tiny Booneville, Ark., was Keith’s hero.

“She was just a really strong independent woman. Her husband died when her youngest child was a newborn, so they had a baby, a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old and they lived way out in the sticks in Arkansas. So she’s young, and she’s strapped with three kids. She’d leave them there in that shack with her parents and drive to Fort Smith to work at the Dixie Cup factory. She worked there for years and became the first female (shift) manager in this gigantic factory. That was in the early ‘50s and she bought a brand new house right across the tracks from the factory. We still have that house.”

Years later, Keith says, “She started taking the cover charge at a supper club and when the lady who owned it retired, my grandma left Dixie Cup and bought it and she ran that nightclub for years, until she retired. She took a few years off, but she couldn’t take sitting at home, so she went down to Walmart. She was just so capable that even at 60-something they recognized what a great person she was. She didn’t need the money. Her house was paid off. She’d worked her whole life.

“She was very important in my life. Here was a woman, a widow, who could just fill in the New York Times crossword puzzle while she had her coffee.”

There’s no doubt his grandmother would be proud of Keith’s latest achievement. In 2012, Keith’s foundation finally broke ground on the OK Kids Korral. The Korral will provide families of pediatric cancer patients a free place to stay while the children receive treatment at The Children’s Hospital at the Oklahoma University Medical Center.

“It’s been almost a decade since we started,” said Keith, who hosts an annual golf tournament and concert to raise money for the project. This year it raised $664,000.

“When we started out, we were going to push all this money toward the Korral, and we started Ally’s House to facilitate immediate needs of kids with cancer. But there was a great need there, and we never turned anyone away. If you had a kid with cancer and you needed help, we were there. So we had to build Ally’s house so it could stand alone, and have its own donations coming in. Finally, one year they said, we don’t need your money. So we started applying that money to the OK Kids Korral. We just started pouring concrete and it’s a wonderful thing. It’s going to be a first-rate facility and we’re really excited about it.”

One of the top earning performers in any genre, Keith took home an estimated $55 million in 2011 according to Forbes, between his annual tour, record sales and record label, his Wild Shot mescal and his popular I Love his Bar and Grill restaurants (he just opened the 12th).

“I’m real happy with where I am right now and I feel like you have to help as many people as you can.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Toby Keith dead: Palm Beach Post interview with country music star