The Cleverlys

Harris grew up in Arkansas, around uncles and cousins who farmed rice, corn and soybeans, and at sixteen won a talent contest at Cash’s White River Hoedown, a live music theater that offered him a job. He went into entertainment full time in 1994 with a stage-comedy act of skits in Branson, Missouri, moved on to stand-up, and from 2000, when he owned his own theater, began combining music and comedy; his first band had played punk. He moved to Nashville in 2006, and the idea for the Cleverlys came to him on a trip to a comedy club in Alabama. He first pitched it as a television concept, but the early YouTube videos, made with musicians he had gathered just for them, brought calls from managers and booking agents before he had a working band. Harris has dated the group’s formation to 2009.

In the act’s fiction, Digger took over the family band after a spell in California tuning the E string for the former teen idol Leif Garrett, and between shows the family runs an alpaca farm near Cane Spur, Arkansas, a town that does not exist. Harris described the idea as bluegrass meeting the television comedy The Office, and in the early days the musicians walked around town in costume to get used to their characters. By the middle of 2011 the line-up was Harris as Digger, the bassist Irl Hees as the blind Miles, the fiddler Mark Pearman as Otto, the banjo player Steve Bush as Vernon Dean, known as VD, and the drummer Stevie Wilkerson as Harvey D.; Harris and Hees were the only original members left.

That summer the band played the CMA Music Festival in Nashville and a run at the Oak Ridge Boys Theatre, was booked for Nashville’s Fourth of July concert at Riverfront Park with Darius Rucker, and was invited to play a Grand Ole Opry broadcast on 15 July 2011 in the middle of a ten-city tour. A mockumentary DVD was announced for that spring, and the band’s first album, The Cleverlys, came out in 2011; a second, Cash Crop, followed in 2016.

Members came and went, and each departure was written into the family story rather than ending a character: Miles, the band explained, had been arrested for running a sloth-fighting ring. By 2019 Digger was surrounded by nephews, among them DVD, Turtle, Sock and Ricky Lloyd. Blue, released in March 2019, was the act’s first album for a national label, Mountain Home; its twelve tracks took their title from Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” and included Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” Kelis’s “Milkshake,” LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up” and the Zombies’ “She’s Not There.” Their stage repertoire also took in Blackstreet’s “No Diggity,” Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” Shaggy’s “Angel,” the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” and Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” and by 2019 the band had toured nationally and played the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

Solid Butter, released by Mountain Home on 28 July 2023, added the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started,” the B-52s’ “Love Shack” and a recorded “Gangnam Style,” along with an original song by Harris, “Climbing Up,” issued as a single. On it Digger plays guitar and sings lead, with DVD Cleverly on banjo, Haggis on mandolin, Wasper on resonator guitar and Ricky Lloyd on bass.