Singer Toby Keith speaks out on ABC censorship

By Brian Mansfield, special for USA TODAY

	By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY
	Country singer Toby Keith has some choice words for Peter Jennings.

Toby Keith says the producer of an ABC 4th of July TV special rescinded an offer to have the country singer perform his current hit after the show's host, World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings, heard the song and vetoed it.

The single, Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), is an outpouring of grief, anger and frustration Keith wrote in the wake of Sept. 11 and the earlier death of his father. The controversial, patriotic song tells of a veteran who lost his eye in a combat training mission and also features a number of confrontational verses.

			Lyrics from Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)
			This big dog will fight When you rattle his cage And you'll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A 'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass It's the American way

"I find it interesting that he's not from the U.S.," Keith says of Jennings, who is Canadian. "I bet Dan Rather'd let me do it on his special."

ABC News spokeswoman Cathie Levine downplays the controversy and says that Keith's camp overstates the reasons he's not going to be on the show.

"They talked to him, but they talked to a lot of people," Levine says. "There were a lot of factors in play," among them a travel conflict, since Keith already had booked a show in Provo, Utah, that night. "The whole production is still in the planning stages."

Keith has been performing the song in his concerts all year, but initially wasn't sure he'd record it. That ambivalence was apparently shared at first by radio programmers. "But the second they put it on," Keith says, "they went, 'Yeah, he's right.' "

"We had one station in Phoenix that actually played an edited version," says DreamWorks Nashville promotion chief Scott Borchetta. "They got complaint callsbecause they bleeped (the word 'ass')."

Courtesy is the fastest-rising single of Keith's career, which has recently included country chart-toppers How Do You Like Me Now?! and I Wanna Talk About Me. The song, nearing the top 10 after just five weeks, will appear on Keith's album Unleashed, due July 23.

"By the time the 4th of July gets here, that thing'll be No. 1, and it'll sit there for weeks," says Keith, who returned this week from a USO tour to the Balkans.

"It was a song I was inspired to write because I lost (my father) six months before 9/11. Nobody wrote an angry American song, and this was one. It was the way everybody felt when they saw those two buildings fall."