New country star Toby Keith was 11 years old when his grade school homeroom teacher required her pupils to write a story during her hour each Friday.
“It could be any kind of story you wanted to write, as long as you wanted to write it and about anything you wanted to write about, but it had to be a complete story,” remembers Keith (who is on a bill Friday with Billy Dean at the Star Plaza Theater in Merrillville, Ind.).
“Everybody used to hate it. Even the girls didn’t like it too much. But I used to love to do it. I’d write about anything, just let my imagination run wild and free as it could.
“That’s the earliest sign I can ever remember of wanting to be a writer.”
Keith is very much a writer now, but not of prose. His initial Mercury Records single, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” is the most-heard of his compositions so far, the first by a debut artist to make the country music hit charts’ No. 1 spot since Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart.”
His album “Toby Keith” contains seven more songs he wrote, and that’s apparently nothing compared with the number of songs the 32-year-old Oklahoman has written since his first songwriting attempt at age 15.
“I’ve written I don’t know how many songs,” he reflects.
When his producers were choosing material for the first album, he says, he gave them 30 of his own songs from which each producer was to pick 15 that he thought were the best. The producers-Harold Shedd and Nelson Larkin-ended up choosing the same eight, and those went on the first album, along with two from outside sources.
Keith’s taste in other people’s songs is good too. One of the two he picked from outside is the current, rollicking “A Little Less Talk (And a Lot More Action),” another big hit.
A salient reason for his fast start out of Nashville’s launching chute is that he spent a lot of time molding his talent in obscurity. By the time Mercury signed him, he already had a Silver Eagle bus and for several years had been making a better-than-subsistence living.
No clone of the stereotypical neo-traditional country male, at 6 foot 4 and 210 pounds he is bigger, and, as a former oilfield worker, rodeo hand and semipro football player, he is probably tougher of spirit as well. His big hit, about a fellow wishing he were a cowboy, was definitely tongue-in-cheek.
“Kind of the hidden meaning behind `Should’ve Been a Cowboy,’ ” he says, “was the fact that I worked in a rodeo company for three or four years through high school, was raised on a farm and wore a (cowboy) hat to school by necessity-to keep the weather off my hair while I was feeding horses and dogs and livestock before I went to school every morning.
“Then when I got to playing music, everybody had a hat on, whether you were from a high-rise in New York City or a high-rise in Dallas or the (rural) country. Everybody was a hat act, so I quit wearing mine, even though I’ve probably been on more bucking stock than any of them. It was the norm to wear a hat, and we wanted to be the abnorm.”
By then, being “abnorm” had gotten to be part of his nature. Born in Moore, Okla., son of an oilfield worker, he came from parents who had competed in rodeos, his father as a bulldogger and his mother as a barrel racer. Getting a job as a rider trying out newly purchased bulls and broncs for a rodeo company across the back fence from his boyhood home was a natural thing.
“I never got what you’d really call hurt,” he says. “I’ve been banged up, stepped on and kicked, but I was never hospitalized for it.”
Meanwhile, he was crazy about music. On the brink of his teens, he remembers, he often would stay with a grandmother who owned a supper club where the eight-piece house band played “everything from Benny Goodman to Hank Williams to `Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.’
“She’d let me sit in with them once a week and play some percussion instrument,” he recalls. “I’d wait all week for that one chance, just to get up there and stand with them and let everybody look up at you.
“I think I got the bug on that at an early age.”
