Country Yossi

Toiv wrote the lyrics for a 2008 NCSY CD, The Jewish Version, that parodied contemporary pop, rock, and punk hits. Toiv parodied "Hey There Delilah" as "Hey There Gedaliah", rewrote "Numb" as "Dumb", and recast "No One" as "Shalom". He composed one of the songs on Shua Kessin's 2009 album. He also wrote the lyrics to "Daddy Come Home" by the Yeshiva Boys Choir, the music video for which amassed over 4 million views on YouTube.

In 1988, Toiv began publishing an English-language monthly advertising magazine called Country Yossi Magazine, distributed in New York City. Many types of topics are discussed including Torah, Humor, People, Opinion, Real Life, Sound Off, Letters to the Editor etc. and often controversial issues are broached by its writers. Various articles relating to the controversy surrounding Chabad messianism were published in the 1990s. In the acknowledgments for her book Holy Brother: Inspiring Stories and Enchanted Tales about Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, author Yitta Halberstam Mandelbaum thanks Toiv for his willingness to print many of her controversial articles, including one about musician-rabbi Shlomo Carlebach which led to her writing that biography.

In 1986 Toiv parlayed his growing popularity into an Orthodox Jewish radio program called the Country Yossi Show in New York City. To satisfy rabbinical demand for separating the sexes, he designated one hour for children, one hour for men, and one hour for women. Later he started a weekly evening radio show in the Catskills. The Country Yossi Show offers music, chat, and halakha (Jewish law) trivia questions with prizes for correct answers. The show aired in 1986 until 2015.

Toiv married Hadassah Buchinger (born 1954 in Tel Aviv) in Brooklyn in October 1973. They have four daughters.

Yossi Toiv was born and raised in East New York, Brooklyn. His father, Chaim Toiv, was a well-known hazzan. As a child in the 1950s, Yossi enjoyed listening to country music and writing Jewish parodies of popular songs, such as "Big Bad Moish" (a takeoff on "Big Bad John").

Yossi (Joseph) Toiv (born January 9, 1949), known professionally as Country Yossi, is an American Orthodox Jewish composer, singer, radio show host, author, and magazine publisher. A composer and singer in the Jewish music genre, Toiv has to his credit three albums as a member of the group Or Chodosh ("New Light") circa 1971–73, seven albums under the name Country Yossi and the Shteeble Hoppers, and a series of six albums for children called Kivi and Tuki. He also released "Country Yossi's Classic Calls" a humorous collection of actual on-air phone calls to his radio show. He has also released two animated Kivi and Tuki DVDs.

The band members eventually married and started working; Toiv sold diamonds on 47th Street in Manhattan. A number of years later, during a summer vacation in the Catskill Mountains, he met bandleader Heshy Walfish and told him about the country music parodies that he had written as a child. Walfish encouraged him to return to the concert circuit with a new persona, Country Yossi, and collaborated with him on new songs.