Who is the Cornbread Cowboi? Behind the shades of SC’s rising social media star

Orry Lee is getting used to being recognized as his online namesake, the Cornbread Cowboi. After all, the character he plays on the popular videos he posts to Instagram and TikTok — a simple country guy with a distinctive look and a bit of a wild streak — is not that far from who he really is.

“This is just who I am,” the star influencer with more than 700,000 followers on his platforms told The State, clad in a Winston T-shirt, embroidered leather belt, vintage Wrangler dress jeans and cowboy boots.

Lee has built a following, and maybe even a career, out of his homages to a kind of small-town nostalgia. The videos feature Lee in various locations, and use humorous captions to both celebrate and sometimes poke fun at a traditionally southern, country, blue-collar lifestyle and interests. Many videos show Lee simply walking in slow motion — often accompanied by classic country songs and featuring vintage cars.

The videos are highlighted by Lee’s throwback style of dress, as well as his ever-present sunglasses, mustache and self-described “beer belly.”

“I’ve always been into vintage, old school clothes. It started with my grandparents and looking at old pictures, and I just thought it was cool,” he said. “I just took influence from the old school stuff, and made it an exaggeration of myself.”

The short videos are underlined by humorous captions such as “Fixin to head down to the Piggly Wiggly and ask that good looking gal behind the cash register if she wants to come over and watch Bill Dance bloopers on VHS,” or “Headin’ inside the Elks Lodge to give a stone cold stunner to the bartender that told me wrasslin’ was fake when I asked him to turn on Monday Night Raw.”

But he didn’t have to go very far to come up with the character. “I am a character, but I don’t play a character,” is how he described the thin distinction between himself and the Cornbread Cowboi.

Lee, 36, grew up in Williston, a town of 3,000 in Barnwell County where his dad was a volunteer firefighter and his uncle was the chief of police. He describes it as a place with a strong sense of community, where men belonged to some kind of fraternal organization that organized local fundraisers for various projects or causes.

“A lot of my character is, he’s a pillar of the community in the daytime,” Lee said. “He’s the volunteer Little League coach, he’ll help out an old lady cutting her grass, but when the sun goes down he’s in a hole-in-the-wall bar. And that’s kind of who I am myself.”

A big influence was Lee’s grandfather Henry Bell, whom the family called “Blue Bell.” He was known as a sharp dresser every time he went to church. Like much of Lee’s family, Bell worked at the “Bomb Plant” at the Savannah River Site.

“My grandpa taught me the simple life,” Lee remembers. “He loved country music, being a storyteller, going out to eat after church, and making the waitress laugh and tipping a little extra. He was basically the man I wanted to be.”

Lee was an all-state football player at Williston-Elko High School, and wanted to play Division II ball when he went to Chowan University in North Carolina. But he felt homesick and soon moved home, where he bounced between jobs on construction sites and a cattle farm while staying at his grandparents’ house.

“Now I tell people not going to college was my college,” Lee said. “A lot of the lingo I use now is stuff I learned from older blue collar men I was working with from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. I learned every rural community has similar but different lingo.”

He eventually followed his brother to Tampa, where he worked for a local barbecue restaurant chain. His outgoing personality and interactions with guests made him a kind of “mascot” for the restaurant, he said. When the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shut down the restaurant, Lee turned to the internet for the same kind of interaction and slowly built a following that eventually spread across the country and around the world.

“Growing up we always liked Jerry Clower, Roy D. Mercer, Jeff Foxworthy, that kind of old-school country style of comedy that went into making short TikToks,” Lee said.

He slowly evolved his M.O. for crafting the perfect short video — first on TikTok and later on Instagram — without, as he tells it, putting too much thought into it. Lee will shoot a video as inspiration strikes him, using his own camera and a mounted tripod. “Then I come up with something funny to say under it, and what song I want to put with it,” he said. “I don’t sit down and try to write it out.”

People now will ask Lee to use their old cars in his videos — “I don’t own all these cars,” he hastens to add — but when he was first starting out, “I would walk around and find these Sunday drivers with a tarp over it, and just ask people if I could get a video,” he said. “And people are proud of those classic cars. That’s their side project. They want people to see it. And it paints the scene of the world Cornbread Cowboi is living in.”

At first Cornbread was Lee’s side project, but “over 2 years, I started to treat it like a job, and people loved it, they wanted more of it, and then I started using Instagram and that took off.”

Lee eventually quit his job at the restaurant and moved home to South Carolina, making the production of daily online content his full-time job. He takes sponsorship deals and sells a variety of Cornbread merchandise from his own website. And he’s gotten noticed. Later this month, he’ll be an honorary race official at a NASCAR all-star race in North Wilkesboro, N.C. In September, Lee will host Honky Tonk Homecoming, a 90s country festival in Nashville featuring the likes of Trace Adkins, Lonestar and Shenandoah.

The Cornbread Cowboi tries to keep up a certain mystique in his videos. Lee said he doesn’t speak in them because he knows Cornbread has a wide following. He doesn’t want his natural Southern accent to distract viewers if the appeal is “he reminds them of their uncle in Minnesota,” Lee said.

His viewers have formed deep attachments to the character. One woman messaged Lee to tell him Cornbread’s similarities to her father helped her recover after her dad passed away. Another told him her father downloaded social media apps to his phone solely to follow the Cornbread Cowboi, and the last message the father shared with his children before he passed away was a Cornbread video.

He thinks his content has gained such a wide audience because it speaks to a community that’s underserved by most media.

“In the entertainment industry, TV, Hollywood, that’s an underserved audience,” Lee said. “Rural country folks just don’t have a big platform, and that’s why this stuff is so popular, because they resonate with my character.”

The one time he did give away any real-world local details on the channel was when he filmed in a bar with a large USC Gamecock logo behind him. It led to an unexpected opportunity for the real-life Gamecock fan.

“Suddenly, people were saying, ‘Cornbread’s from South Carolina,’” Lee remembers — including two particularly prominent fans, USC strength coach Luke Day and tight ends coach Jody Wright. The next thing Lee knew, he was invited to attend a Gamecock football training session, for which Lee said he consciously aped the look of Joe Morrison, head coach of USC’s “Black Magic” teams of the ‘80s.

Current head coach Shane Beamer even called the “celebrity guest” over to talk to a huddle. “I just went right into my old high school coach, and they loved it,” Lee said. Cornbread Cowboi has gone on to make appearances at the Gator Bowl in December when the Gamecocks played Notre Dame, and at USC’s spring football game in April.

Day, the team’s strength coach, said Lee brings a sense of fun and levity to the sidelines.

“I’d been following him, his social media stuff was always funny, and then you start to see little stuff sprinkling in Gamecock stuff here and there,” Day said. “Then one of my friends said ‘you know he’s a big Gamecock fan, he’d have a blast if you brought him out for something.’

“He’s a performer, so he has a great presence,” Day said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing, he’s playing to a demographic and a caricature of a region that doesn’t get portrayed in media that often, so people are picking up what he’s laying down. He lets you in on the joke... Some of the players knew exactly who he was, the whole persona, and some were like, ‘Who in the world is standing around here at practice?’”

Day is unsure when the Cornbread Cowboi will next make an appearance at a Gamecock event. “He is indeed a cowboy,” he said. “He blows in and out of town, like a Willie Nelson song.”

But Lee’s newfound notoriety also has its pitfalls. He worries about maintaining his privacy after some of his content drew what he describes as “overly friendly” messages from some fans. He also said he doesn’t go out as much as he used to because “the bartender will bring me a shot and a beer, and say ‘somebody ordered this for you,’ and I wasn’t even really planning on drinking that night.” He thinks he can’t lose too much weight because a paunch is a recognizable part of the character.

He’s also not sure where he can take the character and his channel from here. Lee said he’s considered branching out into stand-up comedy or longer skits like his collaboration with fellow influencer and recording artist Hannah Dasher, which shows Cornbread’s attempts to woo the singer.

Writers have pitched him on scripts for longer filmed content. “I haven’t jumped on the right thing yet, but I do want to do a comedy, like an old-school Dukes of Hazzard, Kenny Powers-type show.” He’s also writing parody country songs that could turn into a music video or even a full album, the only drawback being that “I ain’t a good singer.”

But in 2023, Lee’s finding like other online creators that the internet has become a medium all its own for people to watch and consume. For younger people, someone like Cornbread Cowboi can be as famous as any character from a TV show or movie. So the plan for now is to let his social media feeds evolve and grow, and hope the audience comes along for the ride.

“I’m trying to make my 15 minutes of fame last for 20,” Lee said.