Should've Been a Cowboy

The Toby Keith Philosophy of Authenticity

Toby Keith

I should've been a cowboy
I should've learned to rope and ride
Wearin' my six-shooter, ridin' my pony on a cattle drive
Stealin' the young girls' hearts
Just like Gene and Roy
Singin' those campfire songs
Woah, I should've been a cowboy

Toby Keith just died and it made me sadder than expected. By any metric, Keith was one of the most successful country music performers to ever exist, earning 32 #1 singles and selling over 40 million albums. I don’t typically like music that popular because I’m a disagreeable person. But Keith’s career spanned my entire sentient life between 1993 and today, a life that was mostly spent in the bible belt of east Tennessee where his music was enjoyed enthusiastically and unironically. His songs conjure in me a unique mix of cringe and nostalgia that only arises to accompany memories of my hometown youth. Accordingly, I’m fond of Toby Keith.

But Keith wasn’t everybody’s red Solo cup of tea. His hyper-patriotism was especially caustic to America’s intellectual elite, which was kind of the point, but also served to caricature Keith as a bigoted redneck for a large segment of the American public. “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way” doesn’t play well on the coasts. Despite this, only the most cynical could deny Keith’s talent, demonstrated most undeniably by a tremulous baritone unlike anybody’s in country music before or since. There’s no mistaking a song sung by Toby Keith.

I don’t regularly listen to Toby Keith’s music and I never have. It’s just always been there, in the background at the grocery store or on the radio while driving through rural America, and as a result much of my life has been soundtracked by his songs, for better or worse. His death made me reflect on my relationship to his music for the last 3 decades, and specifically, the tricky notion of authenticity in American music. What does it mean for an artist to be authentic? Is it a back story? An affectation in a voice? Or something different entirely? And how, in the context of an increasingly globalized world, do we corner anything authentic at all? I found a surprising number of answers in the career of Toby Keith.

Defining Authentic

The first thing I know about authenticity is its definition as reported by Google.com: the quality of being a genuine representation of an original form. Merriam-Webster doesn’t tell you how to identify original forms nor how to ensure genuine reproductions. You just know authenticity when you see it. Whether it’s music, food, cultural experiences, or even individuals themselves, most of us can identify authenticity when it stares us in the face. The gravelly timbre in a voice or the muy authentico texture of a tortilla. But describing the qualities that lead us to conclude that one thing is authentic and another not is difficult, the realm of poetry rather than dictionaries.

The second thing I know about authenticity is that it is inextricably bound to a culture that lends it meaning. Country music, like many (but not all) genres, depends on the existence of a specific culture that inspires and supports it. You know the song well. An endless summer Saturday night somewhere in rural America. Cold beer by the light of a bonfire, stoked by the anticipation of a heterosexual romance that inevitably ignites into a lifelong committed relationship. And pretty much just white. It’s a nice idea, or at least one that enough people identify with, a CULTURE, to support a multi-billion dollar music industry. Other genres are likewise deeply entwined with culture. Hip hop, reggae, and Norteño come to mind. But this is about Toby Keith, so let’s stay focused.

Those cultures in turn produce a pure, primordial archetype untainted by the pretentions and derivatives of modern times to which authenticity may be ascribed. The original, unchanging type specimen against which all authenticity is gauged. These people are typically steeped in legends that impart to members of every culture the specific ways in which they can embody authenticity themselves, as hopeless as it might be to measure up to the original’s greatness.

I’m referring, of course, to George Jones. Or Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, or Hank Williams. Or, if they aren’t your type, Easy E, Bob Marley, or….well I don’t know any famous Norteño singers. You get the point. Cultures produce and elevate individuals that embody their core values because cultures need archetypes for their members to admire. The primordially authentic musicians, artists, cooks, and spiritual leaders that anchor a culture in space and time. Well, cultures did produce these individuals until the postmodernists came around.

Postmodern Authentic

I’m not a fan of postmodernism, but one of the useful things it did was interrogate the notion of authenticity. For those who don’t have a social science degree, postmodernism is that philosophical paradigm devised by a cadre of cigarette-smoking Frenchmen in the 1960s and 70s. When you hear philosophers parodied as saying something asinine like “What is truth, anyway?”, it’s pretty much a parody of French postmodernists. Parody aside, the French postmodernists were more or less correct about the direction culture was headed, and it’s easy to see the society they envisioned manifest today.

Postmodernism subsumes a lot of intellectual ground, but a unifying theme among all postmodern thought is the dismantling of so-called “grand narratives” for society. Things like Christianity and Islam, capitalism and communism, the scientific method, and yes, traditional notions of cultural authenticity. The postmodernists claimed, rightly, that culture is too temporally ephemeral and too spatially dispersed for authenticity to be neatly defined. The moment you describe it, it turns into something else, and it is that perpetual state of change that defines culture rather than a theoretical moment of stasis. Likewise, culture is not and has never been neatly confined to borders. Rather, its boundaries shift and blend with adjacent identities, a process than grows increasingly complicated alongside an increasingly borderless, digital world. The Gods of those grand narratives, both divine and mortal, were dismantled along with the cultures that produced them.

So yes, at one time in the 1960s Johnny Cash was the epitome of Country Music authenticity, the voice of a culture in a time and place when it mattered. But then he changed and the Nation changed and he found himself hosting a kitschy variety show on basic cable, far removed from the authentic persona for which he was known. And before he found Jah and his voice as an international Reggae icon, Bob Marley wore a 3-piece suit and covered bubblegum pop music in a janky Jamaican recording studio. This is the way it’s always been, turtles all the way down to the roots of musical expression in the world’s first cave band, who balked at the first fool bold enough to introduce banging sticks into an ensemble otherwise known for being an authentic rock band.

The postmodernists would have you believe that authenticity as traditionally conceived is complete bullshit, a fanciful fabrication best left behind with every other grand narrative concocted by human culture. They’re kind of right, but it hasn’t stopped cultures worldwide from considering authenticity important enough to hold immense value. With few exceptions, authenticity is valuable and fake is cheap, whether it be the intangible value of experiencing an authentic cultural practice to the tangible value of cold hard cash.

The experience of watching a flawless Elvis impersonator, no matter how realistic, will never be as valuable as watching Elvis live in the studio on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. The performance, though flawed and riddled with sound issues, is probably one of the most important in American history. Likewise, a 1987 compilation of Elvis Presley’s Complete Sun Sessions on vinyl costs $20 while just a single, original Sun pressing containing only two songs routinely exceeds two grand. Given the content alone, the compilation is obviously the better value, but authenticity can be a powerful market force that drives us to make irrational decisions. It didn’t have to be like this. Authenticity could have remained an innocuous quality in no way associated with value. But instead we ascribed value to authenticity and elevated it to a cultural commodity to cherish, buy, and sell.

Authentic Awareness

Which brings me back to Toby Keith. By the 1990s, popular music had largely abandoned traditional notions of authenticity completely. Bob Dylan, the suburban Jewish kid, probably got the stone rolling on dismantling authenticity in American music when he sold the world on the notion that he was some kind of vagabond populist that crawled out of a Steinbeck novel only to plug in, tune out, and abandon the folk revolution he helped start. From there, the punks dismantled music itself and any pretense of authenticity attending it, thereby planting the seeds for an ‘alternative’ rock divorced from an underlying culture and freed from appeals to authenticity. All thanks to a few pretentious Frenchmen.

Country Music, so fundamentally entwined with notions of authenticity, was no different. By the early 90s, the agrarian lifestyle traditionally romanticized through Country Music had largely faded from American life. In my hometown in east Tennessee a local farm subdivided into a middle class neighborhood named Belle Meadows where they gave out full-sized candy bars for Halloween. My friends that grew up suckering tobacco plants were delighted to hear the last family plot sold off to a rental cabin company. We watched Nickelodeon and Total Request Live like the rest of America while the authentic country culture of our hometown, the culture that produced Dolly Parton for God’s sake, languished in obsolescence.

Throughout this time, some neotraditional country music artists tried their best to revive the dying brand. Of those, George Strait is certainly the most beloved. Raised in Texas? Check. And on a cattle ranch? Perfect. Strait was (and is) the perfect country music singer for those who place the expiration date on country music authenticity at around 1965. But people often leave a few details out of Strait’s biography that sully his otherwise spotless credentials. His father was math teacher and they were basically hobby ranchers. And Strait’s first love was not traditional country music, but the Beatles, Kinks, and Rolling Stones, a love he expressed through his first garage band The Stoics. Even King George couldn’t resist the British invasion.

Unlike George Strait, Toby Keith knew there was no going back to Country Music’s days of yore. He also knew that any claims to having lived an authentic country upbringing in 1993 would be considered dubious at best. And that’s why Toby Keith’s debut single was titled I Should’ve Been a Cowboy and not I am Literally a Very Authentic Cowboy. The song invokes tropes not lived but projected from a TV screen during an episode of Gunsmoke. Cowboys haven’t worn a six-shooter on a cattle drive since the 1890s. They carry AR-15s on 4-wheelers. And let’s be real, neither Gene (Autry) nor Roy (Rogers) has stolen any young girls’ hearts in quite some time. The life was gone forever, replaced instead by a creeping sense of nostalgia.

Alot of us felt like Keith in the 90s. The sense that our parents and grandparents lived fundamentally more interesting lives than we did, tied to land and love rather than data and aimless desire. A sincere longing for a simpler time, however naive it might have been, was the most authentic thing Keith could have expressed in 1993, so country’s new culture of forlorn nostalgia crowned him their king. Once there, Keith remained on the country music charts for the next 30 years, with an especially successful run of 10 #1 singles between 2000 and 2004 centered on his hyper-patriotic 4x platinum song Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).

As Keith turned into one of America’s most famous entertainers, he maintained his reputation for country authenticity because his grasp on American taste and sentiment appeared so effortless and instinctual, a natural outgrowth of his core values. He was a patriotic jock from Oklahoma that went straight to the oil fields after graduation. He married young and remained loyal to her his entire life. He wrote most of his own songs, giving them quirky, ragged edges that set them apart from the pre-programmed pop of Nashville song mills. He was not classically good looking.

But perhaps most of all, Keith represented a core value of country music (and of oil field laborers for that matter) that had always existed but rarely went acknowledged: making money. Keith leveraged his fame into a slew of business ventures, even writing a (killer) jingle for the Ford Motor Company in 2002. He was reported in 2013 to be worth 500 million dollars. Thus, Keith didn’t so much eschew traditional notions of what country music should be as he did elevate the culture to a grander scale. Before Keith, country music represented the culture of rural America. After him, it represented the culture of America itself.

21st Century Schizoid Men

Toby Keith’s influence on country music waned in the 2010s and he attended to his signature chain restaurant (I love this Bar and Grill) and charities (primarily cancer). With his departure from the top of the charts, the last vestiges of country authenticity faded from American culture and were replaced with….well, whatever it is we have now. Other aspects of American culture shared the same plight. Kanye West dismantled the notion that hip-hop had to be created by actual drug dealers and gang members, opening the door for the hordes of singing rappers that dominate the charts today. The biggest rock and roll bands in the world abandoned their genre to make dance music, marry actresses, and host reality TV. And in rural communities throughout America, fusion restaurants combining the cuisines of multiple Nations opened in the historic (looking) downtowns of planned communities built on farmland in 2011. And honestly, I think it’s all very liberating and exciting to throw down the shackles of tradition and authenticity and throw ourselves wildly into a future of our own design.

There are holdouts of course. There is (yet another) neotraditional movement in country music that draws from the instrumentation and themes of 1960s honky tonk. Tyler Childers, Charley Crockett, and the like. Meanwhile, one of the most successful commercial country singers, Zach Bryan, makes records that sound a lot like home recordings by Ryan Adams in 2000 in an effort to project a sense of downhome authenticity. I like all these guys alright. I just wish they’d drop the affectations and embrace our brave new post-authentic world.

At a civilizational scale, the recent push to stigmatize cultural appropriation is probably a backlash to a collective loss of authenticity. Cultural appropriation relies on the notion that there are authentic cultures from which one can appropriate, but that idea has long since passed. Still, I understand the ire. If one identifies deeply with aspects of their culture they believe to be uniquely authentic, then it must be world-shattering to realize that they are not unique or special or resistant to change, but completely transient. That realization might just inspire the sorts of ludicrous, hyper-nationalist defenses of culture we’ve witnessed in recent years.

For example, white people aren’t supposed to sell tacos and nobody but black people are supposed to rap. But given that Germans introduced the accordion to Mexico and rappers routinely sample yacht rock in backing tracks, let’s call it a fair trade. Anger over cultural appropriation is not a righteous moral stance. It is an expression of existential angst for the inevitable loss of authenticity that attends living in the 21st century schizoid world.

I don’t have a great answer for those who find unfettered cultural change scary rather than exciting. It’s only going to happen faster and more dramatically in the coming years in the wake of artificial intelligence models that blur the lines between authentic and fake to an even more extreme degree. When even creative provenance is in question. At this point, preciously clinging to authenticity is like trying to herd feathers in a hurricane. So perhaps the best way to navigate these disorienting times is the opposite of the hen-pecking, pearl-clutching instincts of this hyper-sensitive age. It is age-old advice for bringing people together to create new culture and soothe a collective sense of anxiety, and conveniently, it was foretold by Toby Keith in his final Platinum single when he sang:

Let’s have a party

Proceed to party