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Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images for ACM

Eric Church Has A Wild Story Of Meeting Toby Keith For The First Time: "He Laid A Guy Out At My Feet"

The late Toby Keith always knew how to make an impression. Eric Church once reflected on the first time that he met Keith, and of course it happened at a bar.

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Church spun a wild time of seeing Keith at a bar in Nashville to Country 102.5. When Church was walking in, one of the bar patrons had been harassing others. Keith took it into his hands to lay down some outlaw justice.

Church explained, "My first time I met Toby, we both frequented a bar in Printer's Alley in Nashville called The Fiddle and Steel Guitar Bar. And I remember walking in my first time and apparently some of the patrons had been harassing a bartender behind the bar and as I walked in, Toby had taken the guy harassing the patrons and had drug him by his shirt collar all the way down the bar."

Church took the opportunity to introduce himself to Keith. He said, "And as I walked in the door, the guy dropped in front of me, and I look up and there's Toby Keith, and I kinda stuck out my hand and said, 'Hi.'"

Church immortalized Keith as someone who always lived by the beat of his own drum. The singer said he thinks of that story when he remembers Keith. Keith was larger than life in a lot of ways. He said, "Toby was always a guy that did things his own way, and I think of that, I think of that fondly now when I think of him. We got to be friends later and toured with him, but that's how I met him. He laid a guy out at my feet at the Fiddle and Steel."

Toby Keith Remembered

Church and Keith would go on to collaborate together. Previously, he opened up about collaborating with Keith and how they worked well together.

He said, "All I need to tell you about his direction and whether me and him were gonna fit as friends or as anything else is we co-wrote a song the other day. He brought the idea, he goes 'We need to write a song,' and I said 'Okay.'"

He continued, "He brings the idea in and it's 'Reverend Jack Daniels and the Congregation of the Chemically Altered Mind.' So then we wrote it, and it actually turned out to be wonderful. But you knew what you's dealing with right there."

So overall, things went a lot better than when Keith Urban first met Toby Keith.