K is for Toby Keith—For Writing the Soundtrack of Us

Did you ever have a theme song? I did—for 12½ years. And before that, Don had one from 1993 until the day he died in 2012. Both were born out of Toby Keith’s prolific songwriting, which is why K belongs to him in this month‑long daily A to Z Challenge.

According to Rolling Stone, Keith wrote 45 Top‑20 Billboard hits, “many written entirely on his own,” and who knows how many more he might have pulled out of that magical place where songs come from if stomach cancer hadn’t taken him at age 62. If I could have been a songwriter, I’d want to write in that same slice‑of‑life, down‑to‑earth style. If you liked his brand of testosterone, you couldn’t help liking his honest portrayal of the type—a good‑old boy “looking for love in all the wrong places,” to borrow Johnny Lee’s iconic line from Urban Cowboy.

From Keith’s debut single, Should’ve Been a Cowboy, Don and I became hardcore fans. Anyone who knew Don wasn’t surprised that the song became his theme song. From the time he was a little boy, Don loved western clothes—Stetson hats, Frye boots, boot‑cut Levi’s, Pendleton shirts—none of which were common attire in West Michigan. One of the best gifts I ever made him was a hand‑tooled leather belt and gun holster, his pride and joy on his annual hunting trips to Colorado and Wyoming. When Should’ve Been a Cowboy went into the cassette player, even the dog knew it was time to stop what we were doing and sing along with Toby.

In 2008, Toby starred in Beer for My Horses, the only film he produced and co‑wrote. I wasn’t the only person crazy about the song by the same name from that movie. It was his longest-lasting number one hit—the 2003 version sung with Willie Nelson. Nelson was Don’s favorite country western singer and Keith was mine. But I loved that ong for another reason: it reminded me of one of my dad’s stories about a bar where men occasionally rode their horses inside and the horses got served a pail of beer. My grandfather worked in the coal mines, and my dad—still a kid—would meet him at the mine entrance, grab his tin lunch bucket and run it to the bar, get it filled with cool beer and meet his dad at home. It’s also the same bar where my dad, at ten years old, played piano for a quarter a night. (He was self-taught and played by ear.) Try letting a kid do that today. I’ve often wished I were a cartoonist so I could draw that scene: a grinning little boy at a piano, glancing over his shoulder as a horse comes through the swinging doors.

Keith’s song, I Wanna Talk About Me has a punchy rhythm that begs me to crank it up and sing along when it's on the radio, but that’s not why I adopted it as my theme song. It came out the year after Don’s massive stroke, and as any caregiver of a seriously disabled spouse knows, the first words out of everyone’s mouth are always, “How is he doing?” Don was right‑side paralyzed and had only a 25‑word vocabulary for 12½ years. When the song came out I was falling apart—taking him to therapy appointments four days a week, living in a one‑bedroom apartment while trying to sell our two non‑wheelchair‑friendly houses, incomes gone, the dog was spending too much time alone. And in the middle of all that, I was designing a wheelchair‑friendly house and working with a builder to bring it to life. I’d wanted to be an architect since before my teens, and in a strange twist of fate, Don’s stroke gave me a small taste of that dream.

The first time I heard I Wanna Talk About Me on the radio, I cried, “That’s what I need—someone to ask about me, me, me for a change!” Every time it came on after that, I’d turn the radio up and sing along while Don stared at me like I’d lost my mind. This week, driving home from the sleep lab, the song came on again. I hadn’t heard it in years. And just like that, the universe handed me my muse for the A to Z Challenge.

There are other Toby Keith songs I love, but these three will always have the power to take me back—to the years when I laughed, cried, and lived my life the best way I knew how. Funny, isn’t its, how a few old songs can still tap us on the shoulder and say, “Remember?” ©

 Photo: Don as a little boy