Toby Keith pays tribute to late friend Wayman Tisdale in his song "Cryin' For Me (Wayman's Song)."

Singer, songwriter and entertainer Toby Keith‘s new single may be the most personal and emotionally raw offering of his entire career. “Cryin’ For Me (Wayman’s Song)” and its accompanying video pay tribute to the basketball legend, accomplished jazz bassist and close friend of Keith’s Wayman Tisdale.

Watch the video for “Cryin’ For Me (Wayman’s Song)” »

An all-American player for Oklahoma and NBA star before launching his career in music, Tisdale passed unexpectedly in May from complications resulting from cancer treatments that seemed to have left him with a clean bill of health. For Keith, Tisdale’s death was a terrible blow unlike anything he’d experienced before. He poured his emotions into music, writing a song he intended to play at Tisdale’s funeral, but the wound was still too fresh.

“I’ve had some loss in my life, of course my dad, but that’s different,” Keith says. “I’ve lost some friends and acquaintances along the way, but this one was very difficult for me. I wrote this for [the funeral], but I could not get through it. I ended up doing Willie’s ‘Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground’ because I wasn’t attached to that. It was weeks before I could make it all the way through the song. It was tough on me.”

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