Career
Since 1983, Stevens has painstakingly decorated various objects with thousands of colorful buttons. These works include the suits and shoes he wears, the guitar he plays, and a 1983 Chevrolet Chevette. Stevens has also created and operates a roadside museum in Bishopville, South Carolina which houses his art
Dalton Stevens" hobby of sewing buttons onto things began as a reaction to suffering from chronic insomnia for years.
"I have insomnia and I would go sometimes four to five days and nights without sleeping," he explains. The first item Stevens began sewing buttons onto was a pair of denim pants.
"I had nothing else to do while my family slept at night," Dalton says. According to Stevens, he sewed a total of 16,333 buttons onto his denim suit, the buttons took almost three years to sew, and they add 16 pounds in weight to the suit.
At first he used the title "Button Manitoba" but this soon changed to "the Button King".
There are 3,005 buttons on his guitar and 517 buttons on the shoes he first adorned to match his suits. Stevens has also covered two coffins with around 600,000 buttons each. One of the coffins is intended for use at his funeral, and the other is for display at his museum as a lasting testimony to his work.
Stevens plays guitar, banjo and mandolin and sings songs he has written to entertain others and inform them about his unusual story.
Songs he has written include "Insomniac Shuffle" and "Poppin" Buttons", which have been made available on a self-released album. Stevens had initially appeared in a local newspaper in Bishopville called the Lee County Observer.
After that the television station NewsChannel 15 in Florence, South Carolina, broadcast a feature segment on him. These local appearances resulted in a national cable television appearance on Cable News Network. Through these early media appearances, Stevens gained additional recognition for his unusual work in Star Magazine.
This magazine appearance came to the attention of the producers of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and the Button King appeared on the show on March 19, 1987.
Stevens subsequently appeared on the David Letterman show and in a commercial. In 1992, the Button King was featured among several art car artists in the Harrod Blank documentary Wild Wheels. A display wall in the Button King museum celebrates Stevens" media appearances, which also include Time, Roadsideamerica.com, and television appearances with Bill Cosby, Geraldo and Regis and Kathy Lee.
The Button King was also featured in a 2010 episode of Destination Truth.
