JoCo’s viral ‘Dancing Cowboy’ wins new fan with his smooth moves — Justin Bieber
Over the last year or so millions of people have watched videos of Dan Foil dancing whenever and wherever the mood strikes — in the Las Vegas airport, on a Southwest flight, on a Mexican beach, in a Texas tea shop, at a rodeo, in front of restaurants and for his horses in Stilwell, Johnson County, where he lives with his wife and children.
Ever seen a cowboy dancing in a snow-covered pasture to “Ice Ice Baby?”
By TikTok standards, his videos are basic.
No filters. No special effects. No editing. One take. He just hits the record button on his iPhone and dances — a 58-year-old dad nattily dressed in cowboy hats, Western shirts, jeans and cowboy boots who has a bit of Elvis swivel in his hips.
He dances like no one is watching, except millions do.
And boy do they love his moves. On TikTok, he has 12 videos that have earned more than a million views and six with more than 2 million. On Instagram nine of his dance videos have more than a million views.
Along the way someone nicknamed him the “Dancing Cowboy” and it stuck. Now he uses that as his hashtag.
He hasn’t posted much in the last month or so because of a pinched nerve that for a while stole nearly all the feeling in his left arm.
But in mid-July he gained a new fan, a star who knows a thing or two or three about performing in front of millions.
Justin Bieber, or possibly someone in his camp, found a video Foil filmed more than a year ago at Kansas City International Airport as he boogied to “(Not Just) Knee Deep” by Funkadelic.
Snoop Dogg shared Foil’s version last September.
Bieber posted a remix set to his new hit song, “Daisies,” which has more than 100 million Spotify streams.
As of this week, Bieber’s remix had been viewed nearly 5 million times on TikTok.
“Let me know if you need a really old back-up dancer.” Foil wrote when he shared it.
Foil and his family were eating at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth after a horse show last month when a buddy sent him Bieber’s video and asked: Is that you?
Foil casually told his wife that Justin Bieber had reposted his video.
His teenage daughter wasn’t so casual.
“What??”
“So I showed her the video and she’s like, ‘Oh my God, dad, Justin Bieber’ ... and I’m like I’m glad you’re impressed,’” said Foil. “I have an X account but hardly ever look at it. But I think it had 15 million views there the last time somebody told me.
“And again, did it impress me? It doesn’t change me. I’m not going to do anything different because Justin Bieber reposted it. Thank you, Justin Bieber for reposting it. I’m glad you liked it, I’m glad your fans liked it.”
Oh, they did, calling Foil “Mr. Steal Your Girl,” a “real smooth mister” and a “cutie patootie.”
“Imagine scrolling on your FYP and you see yourself on Justin Bieber’s TikTok page,” one fan wrote.
“Remember this Justin when planning your next tour to include KC,” wrote another.
Days later Foil’s ego remained in check because, frankly, he’s just a cowboy dancing to make people smile. “It doesn’t change me,” said Foil, who works for Infinidat, a data storage company
Even before the Beliebers came around, Foil had built an impressive social media resume with 244,000 followers on TikTok, 128,000 followers on Instagram and 32,000 on Facebook.
Just don’t call him a social media influencer.
“By the way, followers? Who came up with that? I’m not Jesus. I don’t have these 12 guys following me. The word follower is just kind of weird to me,” he said.
Even though he works in technology he relies on his teenage daughter to guide him through the inner workings of TikTok.
He’s only danced on a stage once and that was in the parking lot of GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium last season. He’s a Chiefs season ticketholder.
Kansas native Travis Marvin, T-Marv to his country fans, was performing at the pregame Bud Light bash and invited Foil to join him on stage.
Foil has been dancing for fun since he was a little boy. “I think it goes all the way back to 7th and 8th grade basketball, when our coach would take out a jam box and we’d be out there dancing and, you know, just having fun,” he said.
“And then my kids, we’ve always had Saturday morning dance parties where we get up and even when they were like, they could hardly walk, I’d be holding them and spinning and they’d laugh and giggle. So I’ve always enjoyed dancing.”
His wife, Heather, has caught him dancing while he shovels poop out of the horse stalls. “I’m out there dancing, not in a cowboy outfit. You don’t clean stalls in nice shirts. I’m out there with galoshes basically and shorts and a soaking wet T-shirt with sweat, but I’m still dancing, you know,” he laughed.
By now so many people have watched his videos that some want him to change up his moves. But he makes up the steps on the spot. He doesn’t dance to country music, much.
“I like every kind of music. The irony of it is I don’t listen to a lot of country,” he said. “But I love old school, soul, R&B. I love ‘80s punk music, even. I like all kinds of ‘80s and ‘90s” music.
He’s careful about what he dances to, keeping in mind that he has a teenage daughter, with teenage friends, who would not want to see him dance to anything inappropriate. A marketing person once asked him to make a video to the 1982 song “Nasty Girl” by Vanity 6.
He was blunt: “I’m not gonna dance to that.”
But he will pull off the road on his way home from dinner with his wife when he sees a rainbow and dance, just not with her. Fans have asked him to dance with her, but she doesn’t think she’s a good dancer, Foil said.
Anybody can dance, he insisted.
“That’s why TikTok and Instagram are perfect. Anybody can dance for 30 seconds. To me, dancing is a great way to exercise, too. People don’t think of it as exercise. But go out there and just give it all you’ve got for a whole song,” he said..
“And make it a goal if you’re out of shape to dance really hard for a whole song. And next thing you know, dance for two songs”
He first went viral in September 2023 with a video he filmed on his property. He propped his phone on the cap of a fence post like he’d seen his daughter do so many times while FaceTiming and talking to friends.
He intended to record a video scolding her for leaving one of those fence caps on the ground where the horses might step on it. (That’s never happened. No horses were harmed in the making of his videos.)
“I had 82 followers on TikTok, so I’m like nobody’s going to see this,” he said. “But I had a CeeLo Green song stuck in my head, and … you know what? I’ll just do a little dance with that. So I hit record, and I danced to it.
“I didn’t think anything about it, like 10:30 on a Wednesday. I had a lunch with a customer and I’m sitting there and I don’t have social media notifications turned on.
“But my phone is blowing up, and I pick up my phone and it’s my 25-year-old son. I have five, 10 texts from him — ‘Dad, call me right away, Dad call me right away.’ And four missed calls. So I’m thinking he ran a red light, hit a busload of lawyers’ kids or something like that.”
He called his son who told him the video was going viral.
“So on the way home from that customer lunch my phone’s going nuts and everybody’s calling me. … And I’ve got this favorite Mexican restaurant, Jalapenos in Stanley, so I stop by there and one of the waitresses ran up to me and is like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re going viral.’ So I had a margarita. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” he said.
“And during that margarita, 70,000 people watched that video. Just from the time I started drinking that margarita to the time I finished that margarita. And I think it was over a million views, I’m pretty sure, in the first day. So anyway that was kind of the start. And I really didn’t think anything about it.”
Soon after that he and a buddy were having a beer at a bar in the Las Vegas airport when Foil’s friend encouraged him to make another video on the spot.
Foil didn’t want to because he didn’t have a cowboy hat with him. Then he saw a dude in a cowboy hat waiting in line to board a Southwest flight. He walked up to the guy and asked to borrow his hat.
“Sure, mate,” the guy said.
Foil put the hat on, propped his phone against a napkin holder on the bar, popped his AirPods in his ears, hit record and danced to “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” by The Gap Band, “which probably wasn’t appropriate in an airport but nobody else can hear so who cares,” he said.
That video became his most popular yet, earning 11 million views on TikTok.
Rapper and streamer Tyrone remixed the video and posted a new version, as Bieber did, Foil said.
“There’s a bunch of big stars that remixed that to their own music,” Foil said. “And I get a kick out of that. Some people are like, ‘Do you get mad when people use your videos?’ I don’t care. Usually the music they mix it to is even better than what I danced to.”
As his online fame grew, music agents started calling, offering their services. One was shocked when he told her he doesn’t use a videographer or edit his videos or do multiple takes.
“You watched any of my videos?” he asked her. “They all start the same with me looking right at the camera as I hit record.
“She said, ‘This is nuts, this is crazy, I’ve never heard of anything like this.’ She said most people are planning and doing this and this and they’ve got people doing all this stuff.
“And I’m like, ‘Yeah, not me. I don’t want that stuff. I’m going to keep it simple.’ If people like it, great. If they don’t, guess what? All they gotta do is flick their phone a little bit, and they can move on to the next thing.”
Foil is a proud one-man show. Once he enlisted his wife to hold the phone as he danced.
Just once.
“I look at the video and I’m like, you know, I’m supposed to be in the frame of the camera. She was watching me and not watching the camera,” he said.
“Nine times out of 10 I’ll just lean (the phone) on something. If I’m at the airport, I usually set my briefcase on something and lean it on my briefcase or a napkin holder.”
Or the fender of a horse trailer.
The first question people ask is about money. How much money does he make from viral videos?
“It’s not about the money. Any money I make I’m going to give to charity anyway,” he said. “But you get free stuff and it is fun.”
Some freebies he prefers over others.
“There’s stuff that shows up ... these companies will send me microphones to use. They send me the stuff and then they ask me, ‘Will you do a video about it?” he said. “And I’m like, ‘No, do you want me to send it back?’ ‘No, just keep it.’”
But his cowboy wardrobe? He’s grateful for those freebies.
He’s happy to receive merch from brands he already wore and liked. Those breathable Poncho Western shirts. Cowboy boots from Hyer, an Olathe company. Cowboy-approved Kimes jeans. Atwood cowboy hats; he wears one in the Bieber video.
Nine times out of 10 people leave positive comments on his videos, he said, not including those folks who think he’s a clown for doing this.
“Most of them are, ‘Hey, love your dancing. This is what I needed this morning.’ And that’s what I want to do,” he said.
“Social media was started to bring people together. Right? But it’s really become this divisive platform where some people use it to bully. ...
“But I’m just saying, and I really haven’t had a goal, but I want to keep it authentic. I don’t want it to be fake. I’m not trying to sell anything, I’m not trying to push any agenda. I stay out of politics, I stay out of all of that stuff.
“All I want to do, if you’re having a bad day and my dancing made you smile a little bit, I’m glad it did. And that’s all I want.”
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