Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” was inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks, but that’s only half the story.
His now-classic song about American pride and American anger was written, at least in part, as tribute to the father who taught him to honor the U.S. military.
When Did Toby Keith Write “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)”?
Keith got the idea for the song a few days after the attacks of Sept. 11, after seeing some news coverage about the tragedy on the TVs at the gym.
“I was working out in the gym and I heard these talking heads say, ‘Well, I guess we could just bomb them. That would be so the American way,'” he told The Boot in 2017. “And I was like, ‘What just happened to us? Are we just supposed to stand by and let this happen? Could we not be mad as hell about this?'”
“I wrote [‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue’] on the back of a Fantasy Football sheet that was laying there; I just turned it and wrote around the edges and, in about 20 minutes, wrote the lyric out and called it ‘The Angry American,'” he continued.
When Keith submitted the song to his label, they said, “Well, it doesn’t really say ‘Angry American’ in there. Why don’t you call it ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue’?”
“And so I did,” he added.
How Did Toby Keith’s Dad Inspire “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)”?
If you think of Toby Keith as a country artist who supported the U.S. military above almost everything else, you’ve got Hubert “H.K.” Covel Jr. to thank. That’s Keith’s dad, who served as a PFC in the Army in the 1950s and lost his right eye during a training combat mission.
“My father had begged me for years to go on USO tours, and I was so busy — we were doing 130 shows a year — that I just didn’t have it in my schedule,” Keith admitted (via The Boot).
That changed after 2001, when two big events altered Keith’s priorities. One of those was the Sept. 11 attacks. The other was his father’s unexpected death, six months earlier.
“I was like, ‘Now I have to go honor him,'” Keith recounted.
The first verse of “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” shares the true story of how his father served his country and lived his life:
“My daddy served in the Army, where he lost his right eye / But he flew a flag out in our yard until the day that he died / He wanted my mother, my brother, my sister and me / To grow up and live happy in the land of the free…”
How Did Toby Keith Honor His Dad’s Memory?
Covel, Jr. died in a car accident on March 24, 2001. He was 67 years old.
Though Keith originally speculated that his dad could have had a stroke behind the wheel, the truth would come out years later when Keith’s family was awarded $2.8 million in a wrongful death settlement from the owners of the charter bus Covel, Jr.’s car collided with. It turned out that his car had been sideswiped, causing him to veer across the median, and the bus had faulty brakes, causing the fatal accident.
Keith’s father didn’t live to see the tragic events of Sept. 11, or to see how the nation would evolve in the decades that followed. The singer remembered him in 2017 as a “true patriot” who never complained about the injury he sustained during his military service.
He also said that his dad would be “so angry right now to know that we’ve gotten so soft.”
“He was a Yellow Dog Democrat; he was a lifetime Democrat,” the singer explained. (a Yellow Dog Democrat refers to a straight-party ticket voter who would “vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket”.)
“So my dad, he always was like, ‘Everybody feels like everybody’s getting their toes stepped on these days. Everybody has to have thicker skin, and you can’t be soft on things. You have to be stronger and know right from wrong instead of right from left,'” Keith reflected. “And I thought, ‘Man, when those buildings came down, he would be really angry.'”
When Did Toby Keith Release “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” As a Single?
Keith didn’t initially intend to release “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” as a single. In fact, he originally thought it would be a song he played solely for the troops.
The first time he performed it live was at the Pentagon, for a group of Marines about to go on their first deployment to Afghanistan. The song was so new, his band didn’t know it yet, so Keith played the song with just his acoustic guitar.
“When I got done, [the commander] said, ‘You’ve got to release that as a single…That’s the most amazing battle song I’ve ever heard in my life.'”
“And so I prayed about it and discussed it with everybody for a long time, because I knew it was going to cause a storm,” the singer continued. “But at the end of the day, I was like, ‘If it means that much to those guys, then I don’t care. I’ll do it.’ And that’s when we finally decided we were going to release it.”
“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” went to radio on May 27, 2002. As Keith predicted, the song did come along with some controversy — including a clash over the lyrics when Keith was booked to sing it for an ABC special, plus a very public feud with the Chicks.
But the song also became one of the very biggest hits of Keith’s career, and was arguably his signature song up until his death in February 2024.
It was a No. 1 country radio hit that ultimately reached 4x RIAA Platinum certification in 2023, becoming his highest certified single in the U.S.
