Under the glowing lights of Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on April 6, 2017, Toby Keith stood with his hat tipped low and his voice full of gratitude, singing beside guitarist Ben Haggard for the hero whose records had once filled his parents’ Oklahoma living room.
That night marked exactly one year since Merle Haggard had died from pneumonia complications at his home ranch in Palo Cedro, California, on April 6, 2016, his seventy-ninth birthday, and it would have been his eightieth birthday. His widow Theresa Haggard and longtime manager Frank Mull had organized Sing Me Back Home The Music of Merle Haggard and an all star lineup had gathered with The Strangers to honor his life, including Willie Nelson, Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, John Mellencamp, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams Jr., and Keith Richards.
For Toby, born in Clinton and raised in Moore, Oklahoma, that devotion began at home long before Merle became an industry legend to him. His parents Hubert and Carolyn Covel played those Bakersfield albums constantly, and Hubert, an army veteran who worked the Oklahoma oil patch before losing his eye in a rig accident, heard in Merle the truest voice of working class families who had survived the Dust Bowl. Merle was the son of displaced farmers from Checotah, Oklahoma, and his songs carried the weight of that shared history.
When Toby launched the final leg of his Hookin’ Up & Hangin’ Out Tour in the fall of 2007, he was by then one of the highest grossing touring acts in American music in the mid 2000s, regularly packing twenty thousand people into outdoor amphitheaters and stadiums. Instead of filling his bill only with contemporary radio acts, he personally invited seventy year old Merle and his veteran band The Strangers to join the 2007 arena dates across the Midwest and West Coast, saving a prime spot so a new generation of twenty something country fans could witness the architect of the Bakersfield sound in person.
On the road the six foot four headliner treated his opening act like visiting royalty. Toby adjusted backstage logistics, soundcheck times, and set lengths around the older singer’s needs, and each night he walked to the edge of the stage to introduce Merle himself with deep and boyish reverence.
None of the modern country stars they came to hear would have a job without the man about to take the microphone.
After the lights fell and the arenas emptied, Toby skipped the usual post show parties and crossed the parking lot to knock on the door of Merle’s custom Silver Eagle tour bus. Seated at the dinette table late into the night, he listened like an apprentice while Merle shared decades of music history, from working alongside former bandmates of Bob Wills and recording at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood to writing three minute portraits of working men without a wasted word.
Those late talks also turned toward the hard cost of growing old on the highway. In November 2008, a year after their tour together, doctors removed the upper lobe of Merle’s right lung after finding a cancerous tumor, and over the next seven years recurring bouts of double pneumonia repeatedly sent him to hospital beds across the country. Whenever Toby crossed paths with him at festivals and joint appearances, he watched the septuagenarian take oxygen in the wings while short of breath backstage, then refuse to lip sync or shorten his phrasing as he strapped on his Fender Telecaster and stepped into the spotlight right on cue.
They shared a television stage in April 2014 in Las Vegas, when Toby joined Miranda Lambert at the Academy of Country Music Awards to present the seventy seven year old legend with the Crystal Milestone Award celebrating fifty years in country music, followed by a performance honoring his catalog.
When Merle died two years later, Toby honored him in public tributes with heartfelt words that captured a lifetime of admiration.
The greatest singer songwriter America had ever produced.
Back at Bridgestone for the closing of that 2017 tribute, Toby first delivered a solo rendition of one of Merle’s signature 1970 ballads alongside Ben, Merle’s youngest son, then returned with the full cast and Merle’s older son Noel for the final ensemble performance. Five years before his own stomach cancer diagnosis in 2021 would test that same stage grit, the son of an Oklahoma oilfield worker stood under the Nashville lights singing for the man who had connected him to his father, his roots, and the honest songwriting he had studied so quietly on that tour bus.