Sometime in 2023, Toby Keith walked into a Nashville studio to sing “Ships That Don’t Come In,” the Joe Diffie ballad from 1992. He was visibly weakened by the stomach cancer he had made public in June 2022. Nobody in the room knew it would be the last time he ever stood in front of a studio microphone.
The recording was made for HARDY’s tribute album to Diffie, and Luke Combs sang it with him. When it was released, Toby had been gone for 53 days.
A Song Nobody Wanted at First
“Ships That Don’t Come In” was written by Dave Gibson and Paul Nelson. Gibson later said it came out of their very first co-writing session, when he pressed Nelson to open his notebook and Nelson reluctantly showed him the title. Gibson began playing a melody on the spot, and the two worked on it for a couple of hours.
It was a gift from God.
That is how Gibson remembered it. But the song was hard to place. It tells of two men talking at a bar, one carrying a hard life, the other coming to see how much he has been spared, and one blunt four-letter word in the second verse made artists nervous. Gibson believed that single line cost them a cut by Alabama. The song was pitched to others, including the Oak Ridge Boys, without success.
Even Diffie hesitated. He was known for lively up-tempo songs and worried that a serious ballad did not fit him. His producer, Bob Montgomery, asked him to record it once. Diffie did, and he loved it. Released in April 1992 as the second single from his album Regular Joe, it climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard country chart and reached No. 1 on Radio & Records. Some stations asked for a softer word in place of the one that had scared everyone off, but the original version stayed on the air.
A Voice From 2006
Joe Diffie died on March 29, 2020, at 61, from complications of COVID-19. By 2023, HARDY and Big Loud Records were building the third volume of the HIXTAPE series around him, working with the Diffie estate.
The project had something unusual to work with. In 2006, Diffie had re-recorded his greatest hits, and those vocals had never been released. Every track on the album was built around one of those performances, so each guest artist would be singing alongside Diffie himself.
For “Ships That Don’t Come In,” the guests were Toby Keith and Luke Combs. Combs had a personal reason to care. Years earlier, it was Diffie who had presented him with his Grand Ole Opry member award.
To be on a song with Toby was a no-brainer.
Combs said that in a statement after the session became public, and added that it was something he had always hoped would happen but never knew if it would.
One Last Session in Nashville
The label has said only that the vocals were recorded in Nashville in 2023. Dave Gibson later said the two singers cut their parts not long before Toby died. Toby had spent most of that year testing whether his body would let him perform again: pop-up shows at his Hollywood Corners venue in Norman, Oklahoma, a surprise appearance with Jason Aldean in Oklahoma City, and an appearance at the People’s Choice Country Awards at the Grand Ole Opry in September.
In December 2023 he returned for real. He booked two headline shows at Dolby Live at Park MGM in Las Vegas, his first since revealing his diagnosis. They sold out in about two minutes, so he added a third. He played December 10, 11 and 14, roughly two hours a night.
Toby Keith died on February 5, 2024, at 62, surrounded by his family.
Released on Joe’s Anniversary
HIXTAPE: Vol. 3: DIFFTAPE came out on March 29, 2024, exactly four years after Diffie’s death. The 17-track album featured more than 30 guests, from Reba McEntire and Brooks & Dunn to Morgan Wallen and Post Malone. Track three was “Ships That Don’t Come In.”
On it, Combs and Toby trade lines, with Diffie’s 2006 vocal woven through the song. Two of the three voices belonged to men who had already died by the time anyone outside the studio heard it. Reviewers noted that Toby’s voice still carried the same force it always had.
What the Arena Saw
That summer, artists gathered at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville for Toby Keith: American Icon, a televised tribute that aired on NBC in August 2024. During the show, never-before-seen footage of the recording session was played for the crowd. People gasped at how frail Toby looked as he walked into the studio.
On August 29, 2024, the HIXTAPE channel released that footage as the official studio video, showing Toby and Combs at the microphones in what the label called Toby’s final recording session.
Dave Gibson, who had once watched the song get turned down for a single word, said their recording was immensely meaningful to him, and that he was thrilled with how they sang it. More than three decades after he and Paul Nelson wrote it, he was still hoping it might give him one more No. 1.