Toby Keith had a big hit in 2003 with "Beer for My Horses," which he sang with Willie Nelson. Keith wrote the song with his frequent collaborator, Scotty Emerick. Surprisingly, Keith reveals he had the idea for the song long before he was even old enough to legally drink.
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"I worked for a rodeo company in high school, for a real old, elderly gentleman that bedded the stock down at night," Keith tells Dan Rather in an interview. "We were kids, 12, 13, 15 years old, and he kept a pint of Old Crow whiskey in his back pocket. And every night, when we'd get the stock bedded down, he would say, 'You boys wanna drink off of my bottle?'
"Sometimes we would, sometimes we wouldn't. 'Cause we really didn't want to drink that drink, especially Old Crow," he adds with a laugh. But it was what the man said next that gave an early indication of the success Keith would have as a songwriter.
"He would hold it up and go, 'Turn out the lights. Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses,'" Keith recalls. "So I just put that in my back pocket, saved it. I thought it was comical. I thought it was profound. "
How Toby Keith Got Willie Nelson To Join Him On 'Beer for My Horses'
When Keith wrote "Beer for My Horses," he knew right away the song would be a perfect duet with Nelson.
"It was like a million other songs we started to write that just turned out to where I said, 'It's so Old West that I want Willie Nelson to sing part of it,'" Keith remembers. Nelson asked Keith to send him the song before he would agree to sing on it, until he found out what the title was.
"He goes, 'What's the name of it?'" Keith recounts. "And I said, 'It's called 'Beer for My Horses.' It's 'Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.' And he said, 'I don't even need to hear it. I'm in.'"
"Beer for My Horses" went on to be one of Keith's many hit singles. The song remained at the top of the charts for six weeks. In 2008, Keith starred in a movie of the same name, starring Nelson, Rodney Carrington and others.
Keith was 62 years old when he passed away from stomach cancer in 2004.
