Country music icon Toby Keith will perform in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on Saturday night in a double bill with a Saudi lutist, the Associated Press reports, that will coincide with President Trump’s state visit. Tickets are free but available only to men.
Keith, whose Bush-era anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American),” put the jingle back in jingoism, will be joined by the Saudi pop star Rabeh Saqer. The Saudi entertainment company Lammt is advertising the event as a cross-cultural meeting point: “An Arabian lute & American guitar united in a star-studded night.”
Just as Willis Conover spent decades broadcasting American jazz—“the music of freedom,” he called it—to radios across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, so Keith will bring his own strain of American liberty music to an all-male audience of Saudi princes and oil executives.
It’s a strange turn for the freedom-loving troubadour, who once sang, “It’s gonna be hell when you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.” Maybe Mother Freedom can catch the event via webcast.
