Down home in Oklahoma

Saturday, April 15, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.

Almost everything country superstar Toby Keith touches turns to gold - or platinum.

His debut album in 1993 ("Toby Keith," which featured the No. 1 hit "Should've Been a Cowboy") - platinum.

His follow-up album, "Boomtown" - gold.

Add nine more gold or platinum albums, not to mention a number of chart-topping songs, a chain of restaurants and a burgeoning movie career, and there's no doubt about it.

Keith's latest release, "White Trash With Money," went on sale Tuesday , but one of the cuts, "Let's Get Drunk and be Somebody," was released earlier this year and has been No. 5 on the Billboard chart for several weeks.

Keith was in town recently performing at his local restaurant/nightclub - Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill, which opened last year at Harrah's. He has a chain of restaurant/nightclubs similar to the one at Harrah's.

His first motion picture, "Broken Bridges" (also featuring Burt Reynolds) will be released in the fall, and there is talk of more to come.

And he has won almost every major award a country performer can win.

The 6-foot-4 former oil field worker and former semi-professional football player could live anywhere in the world - but his roots are deeply planted in his native Oklahoma, and they keep pulling him home. You won't find him living in Nashville or the Hollywood Hills anytime soon.

"They're just other cities," said Keith, who lives on a ranch near Norman, in the center of the state, south of Oklahoma City. "With the type of technology we have today - there's no reason for me to live anywhere else, so I might as well stay at home."

Keith is proud of his state. He even has a spa in his back yard with the red letters OU covering the bottom so that anyone flying overhead knows he's a big fan of the University of Oklahoma.

"What's amazing about Oklahoma is that the city of Dallas is only 200 miles south of where I live, and 5 million people live there," he said. "There's not but about 3 million in the entire state of Oklahoma - but look at all the artists that have come from here: Reba (McEntire), Vince (Gill), Garth (Brooks), Roger Miller.

"A lot of talent has come from this state. We have an amazing success rate."

And few have been as successful as Keith, who writes most of his own songs or has a hand in them, writing with Scotty Emerick and Dean Dillon.

"I do about 90 percent of my own stuff," he said. "I guess that's unusual in today's market - but I'm a songwriter first of all."

And he doesn't seem to write any bad ones.

He explains his success:

"After you've written so many songs, it gets to a point where you go, you know what, you wrote 300 or 400 songs as a kid and all of a sudden you write a good one; then you write 200 songs and write a good one; then 100 songs and you write a good one.

"After writing a couple of thousand songs, you're down to where you don't really write bad songs anymore - you might write something somebody doesn't like, or something not as good as some of the others, but I feel like I'm only a great idea way from a great song. I'm a professional songwriter; it's what I do best."

Keith's creative antenna is always up, waiting for the next inspiration.

"Like on this album," he said. "There's a song, 'All the Happiness in the World Can't Buy You Money' - that came from a slip of the tongue.

"Scotty Emerick called me up and we were talking, and he meant to say, 'Money can't buy you happiness,' but he got it backward and said, 'Happiness can't buy you money.' I knew the second I heard it that it would make a great song."

The name of the album also was inspired by an unexpected moment.

"We live on the west side of town, the snooty side, where a lot of uppity people who think they have it made live," Keith said. They're "doctors, attorneys, bankers - a lot of the (university coaches) and ex-OU football players live there.

"I'm accepted in those circles because of what I do for a living. If I was just a welder, they wouldn't give me the time of day."

He said his daughter, Crystal, had a confrontation with a "west-side snooty."

"My daughter's like me," Keith said. "She don't take smack off of nobody. She's like, 'I ain't listening to your crap,' and the girl's mother comes up and says, 'Just don't run with her anymore - they're nothing but white trash with money.' "

Keith said his wife wanted to give the rude mother a piece of her mind, but Keith was amused.

"I thought it was hilarious," he said. "I make a lot of money being white trash."

And thus the title was born.

"I'm making money and giving the snooty people the finger at the same time."