Buddy Jewell was born April 2, 1961, and mainly raised in Osceola, Ark. His father (also named Buddy) led him to love the sounds of Marty Robbins and Johnny Horton and his Uncle Clyde taught him to play "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" on the guitar. Enthralled at age 15, he taught himself to perform Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone," a number that remains in his stage repertoire to this day.
Jewell was the quarterback of his high school football team but mainly played tackle in college. He majored in radio/TV, yet music began to take hold. Having forsaken country music as a teenager, the advent of Alabama in the early 1980s turned him around, and he began to play the songs of that band, as well as the music of Don Williams, to his fraternity buddies. Jewell entered a college talent contest, singing the Dave Loggins' hit "Please Come to Boston" and Michael Martin Murphey's "Wildfire."
He left college in the middle of his junior year to get married, though the union last only two-and-a-half years. He was also playing clubs in Little Rock, Ark., where a club owner introduced him to the country band White Oak, which was seeking a new lead singer. With Jewell as its frontman, White Oak joined a stable of bands at a booking agency that also represented Canyon, Lariat and Bayou Speak Easy, the last of which was fronted by a then-unknown Trace Adkins. All four groups worked the lucrative Texas nightclub circuit.
The band broke up, and Jewell worked at Six Flags Over Texas, first in a country music show, then in a gunfight show. In 1991, he won a talent contest sponsored by super group Alabama and opened for the group alongside Mark Chesnutt and Ricky Van Shelton. The following year, he competed on TV's Star Search, winning male vocalist on several episodes. His success on the show emboldened him to try his luck in Nashville.
Instead of instant fame, a brick wall of rejection by many of Music Row's record companies confronted Jewell. His second wife's nail-beauty business sustained them until he began to make a living singing "demo" tapes. George Strait's "Write This Down," Lee Ann Womack's "A Little Past Little Rock," Clay Walker's "You're Beginning to Get to Me" and Gary Allan's "The One" were all first sung as Jewell demos. He has recorded more than 4,000 such tapes. In 1997, he sang 663 song demos.
In 2002, Jewell won the Nashville Star cable TV series, securing a record deal with Columbia, with Clint Black producing the first album. "Help Pour Out the Rain (Lacey's Song)" earned substantial airplay in 2003.
Source: http://www.cmt.com/artists/az/jewell_buddy/bio.jhtml
