Krystal Keith On ‘Toby Keith: American Icon’ TV Special: ‘It’s Fitting’

Photo byCourtesy of Shock Ink / Country Music Hall of Fame

Krystal Keith is speaking out about her father, Toby Keith, who will be honored with a star-studded, televised tribute tonight (August 28). Krystal performed “Don’t Let the Old Man In” as part of Toby Keith: American Icon, which will air on NBC at 9:00 PM ET, and stream the next day on Peacock.

Toby Keith: American Icon features performances by Luke Bryan, Carrie Underwood, Jelly Roll, Eric Church, Ashley McBryde, Parker McCollum, Darius Rucker, Lainey Wilson and many more, an appropriate way for the country music community to honor Toby, who passed away on February 5 from stomach cancer.

“I think to us, I don’t want it to sound pompous, but it’s fitting,” Krystal tells UMG Nashville. “I think he would have rejected it a little bit. He always did reject it. In fact, the BMI Icon Award that he received, they talked to him about giving him that for several years before he actually received it. And he kept turning, he kept telling our manager, ‘I’m not ready for that yet. I feel like those types of awards are given to people that are at the end of their career, that are already retiring, that have kind of stopped touring … I’m still selling out arenas. I’m still putting music out. I’m still climbing and I haven’t started a decline yet.’

“I think he just wasn’t willing to say, ‘Okay, this is the level of what my iconic status will be, because I’m still going. I still have room,'” she continues. “For us, especially now that he’s gone, very few artists attain the statistics of success that he attained. I mean, he is a Hall of Fame songwriter, all-genre and country. He’s now being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Those aren’t given to people. The New York Songwriter Hall of Fame is one of the greatest honors any songwriter can get, all-genre, across the world, and he’s in that. It’s a very select group of people and there’s a reason for that.”

Photo byCourtesy of NBC

Krystal, a talented singer-songwriter as well, is still in awe of her father’s talents, especially when it came to penning his own songs.

“He was an incredibly prolific songwriter,” she boasts. “He sold so many albums, so many spins. His tours were record sales. He sold out tours constantly. He never really had to shift his model, because his tours always sold out. So, I think ‘icon’ is a great word. It’s incredibly fitting. And I think it’s more than deserved for him. He definitely deserved it.”

Toby’s final album, 100% Songwriter, was all songs he wrote by himself. The record just scratched the surface, according to his proud daughter, of what her father was capable of as a songwriter.

“He’s an incredible writer,” Krystal boasts. “If you look at his discography, he wrote 98 percent of the songs he put out. He wrote or co-wrote, and a lot of them he wrote by himself. He just had a way of putting — he had a song that he had in his pocket for probably 12 years that he sang to me when I was a teenager that he ended up putting out, I think when I was in my twenties. It had a line that said, ‘I know she hung the moon cause I’m the one that held the ladder.’

“And I was just always just like, ‘Yeah, I wish I could write like that,” she adds. “I mean, I’m a songwriter, but just growing up, watching him create these incredible songs and storytelling through lyrics like that. There’s a reason he’s in the Hall of Fame. There’s a reason.”