Toby Keith is back … again! The country stalwart popped up at a recent show LoCash played at Orlando’s Tin Roof bar and music venue, surprising the crowd with a fiery rendition of rock ‘n’ roll standard “Johnny B. Goode,” as well as a few other songs.
“[Toby Keith] was in the house the other night,” LoCash write on social media, sharing video from the performance. “We loved gettin’ to play some songs up there with him and tear it up.”
Keith has stayed pretty quiet over the course of the past year, after announcing his stomach cancer diagnosis in June 2022 and wiping the rest of that year’s tour calendar clean in order to rest and recuperate from the disease and its ensuing treatments. He made a couple of public appearances, but fans didn’t see much of him until this summer, when he played two back-to-back pop-up shows in his home state of Oklahoma.
Since then, Keith has been more active: He spent his birthday with fishing legend Jimmy Houston and sang karaoke in the backseat of an Uber. During his time onstage with LoCash, Keith bounced around the stage and flashed a big grin to the crowd, as LoCash served as his backing band onstage behind him. Though Keith has appeared markedly thinner than in the past in all his recent public appearances — including this show — he seemed full of energy, and effortlessly worked the crowd as he and the band jammed out to “Johnny B. Goode.”
Around the time he started playing shows again, Keith gave an interview to the Oklahoman, explaining that he’d been feeling well enough to reassemble his band for a couple “test run” shows, to determine if he had the stamina to mount a fall 2023 tour.
In that interview, he explained that he’s still fighting cancer, but that his tumor has shrunk by a third, and that he’s taking immunotherapy and working with a nutritionist in addition to continuing chemotherapy.
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