Jelly Roll recently entertained fans at Stagecoach with a rousing tribute to the late great Toby Keith. The singer performed "Should've Been A Cowboy" for crowds.
Speaking with Variety, Jelly Roll revealed that he had been playing the song even before Keith passed away. He realized that Stagecoach was the perfect time to honor Keith. He said, "Amazon just came to us and talked to us about partnering for something cool for Stagecoach and, as I was flipping through the ideas, I had been covering "Should've Been a Cowboy" for about a year now at most of my shows, just kind of honoring Toby as he was getting sick before he passed away. Then I really started chewing on, man, what better place to honor Toby than Stagecoach? Plus, Toby Keith was one of the artists that from afar, even though he would never have known it, encouraged me to do country music."
Fans loved the tribute with one person writing, "Toby would love this." Another wrote, "TPain and Jelly Rolly sounding more authentically country than 95 % of country radio today." Another wrote, "I believe tpain when he says I should have been a cowboy." Jelly Roll also opened up about his appreciation for Keith as an artist.
@laurennnhoward Day 1 Stagecoach 2024 ??❤️ #stagecoach #palmsprings #countrymusic #america #fy #fyp #tpain #jellyroll
Jelly Roll Talks Toby Keith
He said, "Just with songs like 'Should've Been a Cowboy' or 'The Next Thing on My List' and 'I Love This Bar' — just the whole way he put his personality into his music. He was an outlier. He was unapologetically Oklahoma. There are a lot of things he did that encouraged me and empowered me. He was very individualistic and carved his own path and he did it his own way, from pillar to post. He never knew it, but he was a mentor to me, just watching him from afar."
As far as T-Pain, Jelly Roll described as the perfect surprise guest for the venue. Jelly Roll also said that T-Pain had a prior connection with Keith, so it made sense.
He said, "I love T-Pain and I love his work and I was thinking about who would be a perfect surprise guest for Stagecoach that nobody would see coming. I love putting together odd pairings, because I think I'm an odd pairing by myself. And I think Toby was kind of all about that too. And then when I got to talking to T-Pain about Toby just in general, he was telling me the story about how the only time he's ever done something big in the country space, at the CMT Awards, he was presenting with Toby [in 2009]. And he was just talking about just how awesome Toby was just as a human and how Toby made him feel comfortable and was cracking him up before they went out."
