“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” recalled another of country music’s biggest in-your-face-conservative political hits: Merle Haggard’s 1969 hit “Okie From Muskogee,” which took aim at student-led antiwar protests and was written in the voice of a fed-up rural American. (“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don’t take our trips on LSD.”) In some ways Mr. Keith modeled himself on Mr. Haggard. Both former oil field hands, they shared true working-class bona fides and expressive baritones but practiced a personal brand of politics that could seem confusing. Mr. Keith had broken into the country music scene with his first single, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” a light-as-a-breeze nostalgic number that went on to become the most-played song on country radio in the 1990s. Mr. Haggard was, early in his career, more of a sad-sack singer, performing songs about jail stints, hard drinking and heartache.
Over the years Mr. Haggard gave conflicting accounts as to whether “Okie” was intended sincerely or meant as a sly satire. I like to think it was a bit of a joke, but then my politics are more progressive in general. As a guy who has debated this topic over flat beer in honky-tonks across America, I’ve found that opinions tend to fall neatly along party lines.
Mr. Keith’s political affiliations could be just as confounding. He was a Democrat until 2008, when he switched his registration to independent, and in 2009 he traveled to Oslo to perform at a celebration of President Barack Obama’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2017 he headlined President Donald Trump’s inauguration — where he took a moment to thank Mr. Obama from the stage. His politics certainly seemed contradictory but his stubborn willingness to treat every American president with respect revealed a consistent moral code. He was a throwback to a time when a man could play a guitar with an American flag on it, wearing an American flag on his shirt, in front of the American flag, and nobody would assume he voted one way or the other.
In 2017, Mr. Keith performed the first live concert by an artist in Saudi Arabia in 20 years on a double bill with the oud player Rabeh Saqer. Mr. Keith’s willingness to do this gig — or the Nobel Prize ceremony — reminds me of the words of Pete Seeger, who, when he was questioned in 1955 by the House Un-American Activities Committee about whether he had performed at Communist Party meetings, said, “I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin or situation in life.”
In this way, Mr. Keith was less a precursor to a musician like Jason Aldean, who had a hit last year with the jingoistic provocation “Try That in a Small Town,” than a spiritual predecessor to Oliver Anthony, the singer whose backyard recording of “Rich Men North of Richmond” created a political firestorm last summer. Mr. Anthony’s politics are also a roller-coaster ride, especially for an American public conditioned to map everything along red-state/blue-state lines. His song was championed as an antigovernment screed by conservative pundits before Mr. Anthony denounced conservative news, praised immigrants and declared himself “pretty dead center down the aisle on politics.”
