Granger Smith and the explosive Earl Dibbles Jr.
CHARACTER WORK
IGNORANCE IS BLI$$ Searching for substance in country singer Granger Smith’s comedic redneck alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr. BY SETH SOMMERFELD
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lot of people would love to be music stars. A lot of music stars love being other people. There’s no shortage of notable alter-egos throughout musical history. David Bowie glammed up to portray the interstellar Ziggy Stardust. Cross-dressing punk David Johansen turned on the cheese to become lounge singer Buster Poindexter. Miley Cyrus split time as Hannah Montana, and mined the musical double-life for kiddie sitcom hijinks. The list goes on and on. A current cog in that continuum is Earl Dibbles Jr., the redneck alter-ego of country singer Granger Smith. On his own, Granger Smith has settled into a comfortable spot in the modern country landscape. The Texan’s had five albums land on Billboard’s country charts on the strength of relatively nondescript moderate hits like the love song “It Happens Like That” and the pickup truck-driving ode “Backroad Song.” If there was a video game about country singers, Smith would be the generic default in the create-a-singer mode. So it’s not shocking he’d look for a way to break out of that mold. Earl Dibbles Jr. emerged in 2011 via a video Smith made titled “Country Boy (Part 1).” The documentary
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style follows Dibbles — Smith speaking in a slack-jaw drawl while adorned in overalls, a white tank top, and a trucker hat — during his daily routine of cracking cold ones, putting in dips of chewing tobacco, shooting his shotgun, etc. It’s relatively mundane, but was enough of a YouTube hit that Smith decided to record a song as Dibbles, 2012’s “Country Boy Song,” which extols the virtues of the stereotypes laid out in his initial video. Sitting at 27 million views, the music video for the song is by far Smith’s most-watched clip. It led to a slew of Dibbles content: fake presidential campaigns, college football picks videos, and in-character songs on all of Smith’s subsequent albums. Five of Smith’s top-eight songs on Spotify are Dibbles tunes including the on-the-nose “Merica” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” the gasguzzling “Diesel,” and the Smith/Dibbles duet “Holler.” If the Blue Collar Comedy tour had a musical opener, it would probably be Dibbles since he’s essentially a living “You Might Be a Redneck” joke (except poorly written by a musician instead of a comedian) mixed with a somehow far less subtle Larry the Cable Guy (Dibbles even has a catchphrase, “Yee Yee,” which Smith has adopted for his Yee Yee Apparel brand).
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hile alter-egos may seem like less of a fit in country than other pop genres, the trend actually predates the more familiar rock star touchstones. In 1953, Hank Wiliams released an album of songs as Luke the Drifter. The character dispensed temperate moralistic wisdom, essentially serving as the antithesis of Williams’s real life persona centered on hard living, boozing and infidelity. One of the most-mocked alternate identities also emerged from country — Garth Brooks’s moody, soul-patched rock persona Chris Gaines. Comedic musical alter-egos are also nothing new. Digital Underground’s Humpty Hump allowed rapper Shock G to tap into his sillier and raunchier side, and fans ate it up. Father John Misty started out as Josh Tillman’s fabulously cutting satire on L.A. rockstar navelgazing (though the humor of FJM flew over many folks’ heads, who took it literally and found it unsufferable). Scrolling back through YouTube, one can see that Dibbles isn’t Smith’s first attempt at comedy and character work, and isn’t even his most cringey one. Granger also attempted to embody an awkward interviewer (Lionel), an obsessed female fan (Key), a magician (Criss Angel), and most troublingly, a mind-numbingly lazy, racist
