Toby Keith could sing almost anything. The country music superstar enjoyed a 30-plus year career, which ended tragically when he passed away in 2024. But his voice will live on, including in a new video that recently surfaced, of Keith singing a country music anthem.
Videos by Wide Open Country
In the video, Keith sings a cover of Hank Williams Jr.'s "A Country Boy Can Survive." The song was first released in 1982, but remains a favorite of plenty of artists to cover, including Keith.
The song says in part, "'Cause you can't starve us out and you can't make us run / 'Cause we're them old boys raised on shotguns / We say grace, and we say ma'am / If you ain't into that, we don't give a d--n." It's a lyric that seems as suited for Keith as did for Williams.
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Keith passed away on February 5, 2004, from stomach cancer. Keith's music touched countless lives, including inspiring country music stars, like Brantley Gilbert.
"Toby would kind of leave you with your head sideways sometimes, just how talented he was," Gilbert tells Taste of Country. "There was the God-given element that was there. But there was also the part that he ground out himself, just through years of experience. At one point, he just said, 'I'm going to be me, unapologetically.' To do that and succeed at it you have to be a man worth something."
Keith was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame last October. He was inducted by Alabama's Randy Owen.
"Some DJs down home in Alabama told me there was a guy playing at a local club," Owen recalls. "It was pretty easy to see that this guy on stage had been working hard. And he knew what it was like to come up the hard way, work hard. He had a grit in his voice, and a grit in his performance. Something that I truly admired because, coming up the way that I come up, through the clubs and working for tips, this guy excited me to listen to him."
Keith's final recording was singing with Luke Combs for a cover of Joe Diffie's "Ships That Don't Come In." The song is part of HARDY's Difftape record.
