NEW YORK, June 14 — Surrounded by images of music icons, Billy Ray Cyrus, the actor and country singer, saw a bit of himself in David Bowie.

“Dude, that’s almost my frickin’ hairdo!” an elated Cyrus said on a recent afternoon after he caught a glimpse of the late rock god’s ‘70s mullet on a T-shirt at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in SoHo.

“I’m sending this to Miley,” Cyrus said, referring to his pop star daughter, while reaching for the garment.

Even beyond appearances, it’s possible to see why both of them admire Bowie, that relentless pop chameleon. Billy Ray Cyrus, though never quite respected for his music or hairstyle, has managed to stretch his down-home charisma, distinctive look and willingness to engage with the kitschy and the lowbrow into a constantly regenerating career of nearly 25 years.

By embracing his cowboy camp factor, and now his ageing rock-dad essence, Cyrus, 54, has ambled down a surreal path from his first, biggest hit, Achy Breaky Heart, in 1992, to a varied acting résumé, including roles in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Disney’s Hannah Montana, which made Miley Cyrus a star.

Along the way, there were detours to tabloid purgatory, borderline irrelevance and Sharknado 2. And yet even after going Hollywood, Cyrus has enough juice in the country-music universe to carry an acerbic, self-mocking original series, Still the King, which premiered on CMT.

“I’ve reinvented a couple times in my career, at least,” said Cyrus, who has mostly laid low since his daughter’s post-Disney cultural emancipation. “But how do you reinvent out of Hannah Montana?” he continued. “And then it hit me: A dysfunctional Elvis impersonator who lies his way into the church. That made sense.”

“I told Miley about it,” he added, “and she said, ‘Dad, that’s exactly what you need’.”

Still the King, a single-camera comedy with a gritty Southern feel, finds Cyrus, a co-creator of the show, playing an exaggerated take on the worst version of himself: “Burnin’ Vernon,” a louche one-hit wonder scamming his way into a job as a preacher and into the life of the teenage daughter he didn’t know he had.

Jayson Dinsmore, the executive vice president of development for CMT, said the show represents a new push for the network into premium scripted programming. He compared Cyrus’ role in Still the King to that of Larry David in the art-imitating-life comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm — but with a star who’s “undeniably charming.”

“Sometimes we forget how successful Billy Ray has been,” he said. “He’s one of those people who has multigenerational fans.” Also, Dinsmore added, Cyrus is “incredibly good looking — women flock to him,” a boon for a network whose viewers lean female.

Cyrus, a Kentucky native and politician’s son, whose own glad-handing puts him somewhere between George W. Bush and Joe Biden in manner, said, “I kind of traded my musical soul to be an actor.”

Despite never truly being welcomed into the country establishment, “I’m a singer-songwriter first and foremost” and not technically a one-hit wonder, he said.

Some Gave All — Cyrus’ first album — “had four hit singles on it,” he insisted, adding a few expletives for emphasis. “Here’s the damn truth: I’ve had more hits than any one-hit wonder in the world. I don’t mean that as bragging because I wish that my name wasn’t even in that conversation. But if you look on Wikipedia, it’ll say that.”

Despite his early musical success, Cyrus saw the writing on the Nashville wall when his third album in three years failed to match the first two. “I said, uh-oh, they’re coming after me,” Cyrus recalled. “The teeter has gone to totter — I’m on the way down.” He cited his message-driven songwriting, including an emphasis on the environment. “That’s the last thing they want to hear from me,” he said.

Thus began one of the stranger recent sagas in US celebrity bootstrapping as Cyrus willed his family (six Cyrus children in all) — and especially the daughter born Destiny Hope Cyrus — into becoming a household name.

Following in the footsteps of diversified country stars like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton — and more recently, rappers like LL Cool J and Ice Cube — Cyrus aimed for longevity on screen, first in an appropriately bizarre meeting with an auteurist director.

“I had two stolen chickens in my agent’s car while I did the interview with David Lynch,” Cyrus said, having rescued the baby birds with Miley Cyrus and her brother before they could become snake food at a petting zoo in Malibu.

After he cameoed as the philandering pool guy in Mulholland Drive, Cyrus was cast as the lead — a Christian physician — in Doc, which ran from 2001 to 2004 on Pax TV. Miley Cyrus guest-starred on the show and by 2006 had debuted as the meta-pop star Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel, with Billy Ray Cyrus appearing as her father, Robby Ray.

What followed, along with more fame and fortune, was years of teen-idol (and parenting) scrutiny — Miley Cyrus’ risqué Vanity Fair photos, the bong video, the twerking — that seems almost quaint in retrospect.

“When you work as much in the business as we do, there’s gonna be peaks and valleys,” the father said. “Fame is a dangerous thing, but when you volunteer for it, you have to accept that it ain’t all roses.”

“Here’s a lady singing about it right now,” he added, motioning to the speakers playing Piece of My Heart with Janis Joplin.

For her part, Miley Cyrus relishes a low-key relationship with her father these days. The pair prefer hanging at home, playing music together (she bought him a Tibetan singing bowl for his birthday) — “no TV on, just us talking, not on our phones or out to dinner for show,” she told this reporter last year. “I feel lucky that I’m his kid. When I sit with my dad, there’s a million things I could say that he could’ve done differently — as you could with any parent — but he’s the best dad I could’ve ever chosen.”

Although he stresses his outsider status, Cyrus, who favours distressed jeans, big sunglasses and western boots, also enjoys his insider connections. At the John Varvatos store on the Bowery, a staffer referred to Cyrus as a “friend of the brand,” gifting him a US flag scarf and leather jacket.

Further downtown, while perusing the Morrison gallery’s rock ‘n’ roll photos, he told persuasive big-fish stories, as if holding court on a bar stool, of intimate interactions with the likes of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Carl Perkins, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, George Jones and even Kurt Cobain.

“I wrote a poem about Kurt the day he died called ‘The Circus’,” Cyrus said. It was about life under the spotlight. “That’s when I said to myself, I need to step back from this because I don’t want to die.”

Cyrus eased his hard living — his only real indulgence since the mid-90s is marijuana, he said, but “just about enough to keep me from drinking” — although his ambition hasn’t slowed.

In addition to his 14th studio album, Thin Line, due for release in September, he has been writing an environmental horror film about “fracking and all the damage it’s doing — but with blood and guts,” he said.

Raised in a family of Southern Democrats, Cyrus said he follows politics “probably much deeper than anyone would think,” although he stopped short of picking sides in the presidential election, saying only that he respects both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, whom he called “a very brave and very intelligent man.” (His promotional tour for Still the King, with its potential red-state audience, included Fox News.)

“If there’s a heavenly father, there’s gotta be a Mother Earth,” he said, echoing his daughter’s own recent hippie-activist tendencies. (“I have to tell you, she learned that off me,” he added.) He also spoke out recently on Facebook against laws that regulate transgender bathroom access, citing his daughter’s involvement in LGBT issues.

But good-natured as ever, he shrugged off any suggestion that his continued relevance is due only to his headline-making daughter. “I don’t worry about it,” Cyrus said, aviator glasses shining on a New York street. “I was here first.” — The New York Times