On September 28, 2023, Toby Keith stood on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, 62 years old and visibly thinner after two years of fighting stomach cancer. He had just been handed the first Country Icon Award at the inaugural People’s Choice Country Awards. The song he chose to sing that night was “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” a song he had written five years earlier about somebody else.
A Question on the Golf Course
That somebody was Clint Eastwood. According to a December 2018 report in Golf Digest, Eastwood invited Keith to be his partner in late May 2018 at the Clint Tournament, a three-day charity event at Eastwood’s Tehama Golf Club in Carmel, California, next door to Pebble Beach. Keith was already a regular at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which Eastwood chairs, and the two had become friends through golf.
Somewhere during those rounds, Eastwood mentioned that he would turn 88 that Monday and that filming on a new movie started the following week. Keith asked him what kept him going. Eastwood’s answer, as Golf Digest reported it:
“I get up every day and don’t let the old man in.”
“I’m writing this down right now,” Keith told him. In later retellings, Keith remembered the words a little differently, as “I just get up every morning and go out. And I don’t let the old man in.” Some later articles also move the conversation to Pebble Beach in 2017. The 2018 account fits the calendar: Eastwood turned 88 on May 31, 2018, and the movie he was about to shoot was The Mule.
The Demo Nobody Fixed
Toby Keith didn’t ask to put a song in the film. He went home, wrote “Don’t Let the Old Man In” by himself, and sent it to Eastwood, hoping he would consider it.
What he sent was a demo, and he recorded it on a day he was sick with a cold. He meant to cut a better version later. Eastwood heard the rough one and wanted it in the movie as it was. “He wanted it sick and tired and dark like that,” Keith recalled. A polished studio version was never made.
The song came out on December 7, 2018. The Mule opened a week later, with the song playing over the closing credits. On the charts it was a modest record for Toby Keith: it peaked at No. 41 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and No. 45 on Hot Country Songs.
When the Song Changed Hands
In the fall of 2021, Toby Keith was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He made it public in June 2022 and spent the next year in treatment, including chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.
By the night of the People’s Choice Country Awards, the song meant something new. On the red carpet, Keith told reporters he had chosen it mainly because of the cancer fight he had been going through for the past couple of years.
Inside, fellow Oklahoman Blake Shelton sang Keith’s “Who’s Your Daddy?” and then presented the award. Keith opened his speech with a joke about his weight loss:
“I bet y’all never thought you’d see me in skinny jeans.”
Then he thanked God for letting him be there, saying the Almighty had been “riding shotgun” with him for a while. He thanked his family, his band and his fans. Then he sang. It was his first televised performance since his diagnosis, and it would be his last. Cameras caught his wife, Tricia Lucus, wiping away tears.
Within days, a song that had barely touched country radio sat at No. 1 on the iTunes country chart. It also climbed to No. 3 on Billboard’s all-genre Digital Song Sales chart.
“You Think I’m Dying, Don’t You?”
Toby Keith wasn’t finished. He booked two shows at Dolby Live at Park MGM in Las Vegas for December 10 and 11, 2023. They sold out in about two minutes, so he added a third and final night on December 14.
On the first night, before he sang “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” he teased the crowd, according to Music Mayhem Magazine as quoted by American Songwriter:
“You think I’m dying, don’t you? Me and Almighty got this, we’re good, y’all!”
Then he explained the song in his own words. He said he had gotten up every day of his life, tried to be productive, and wasn’t going to let that old man in. They were nearly the same words Clint Eastwood had told him on the golf course five years earlier. Only now, Keith was talking about himself.
After the last show, he posted that three sold-out shows in Vegas was “a damn good way to end the year.”
Clint Eastwood’s Goodbye
Toby Keith died on February 5, 2024. He was 62. His family said he passed peacefully, surrounded by family, and that he “fought his fight with grace and courage.”
The next day, Clint Eastwood, then 93, shared a photo of himself and Keith standing side by side. He wrote that he was “extremely saddened” by the passing of Toby Keith, and added: “Rest in peace my friend.”