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Nashville's reject now its rising star
By David Hiltbrand
Inquirer Staff Writer
The year's most unlikely music success story? Here's a hint: It's not that walking bobblehead Clay Aiken.
Try a paunchy 42-year-old with a face as weathered as venison jerky, a journeyman singer who was turned down by every label in Nashville at least once. That's Buddy Jewell.
The record companies had no use for him. But the people love him. Two weeks after viewers of Nashville Star on cable's USA overwhelmingly selected him as winner of the amateur talent series in May, Jewell made his first Grand Ole Opry appearance.
"I was in a daze," he recalled recently. "I was walking off stage and Eddie Bayers, a great session drummer, came up and said, 'You got two standing ovations. I've been playing on the Opry for more than 20 years and I've never seen that happen.' "
A month later, Jewell's eponymously titled CD debuted at number one on the country charts. (Nashville Star's grand prize was a recording contract.)
And tonight, he'll perform on the prestigious Country Music Association Awards (8 to 11, Channel 3), where he is favored to take the Horizon Award as best newcomer.
What does it say about the music business when a guy it treated as a pariah is so passionately embraced by the public?
"It goes to show that the record executives don't always have their fingers on the pulse as far as what appeals to the country audience," says Clint Black, the country star who produced Jewell's CD, which has sold more than 275,000 copies. "It probably shakes them up like crazy."
Since his win on Nashville Star, where he beat 11 younger, hipper contestants, Jewell has barnstormed the country. Because the major country tours were booked months ago, he grabs gigs where he can. On Sunday, for instance, he will sing the national anthem before the Pittsburgh Steelers game at Three Rivers Stadium.
A guy like Jewell, who has had more doors slammed in his face than a Jehovah's Witness, is just grateful to be working.
On the phone from a motel in Claremore, Okla., site of another one-night stand, he describes his Osceola, Ark., upbringing as "quite simple, small-town America. Both my grandparents were farmers." His parents, from the town of Dyess, were schoolmates of Johnny Cash.
Jewell harbored gridiron dreams until his junior year at Arkansas State, when he dropped out, got married, and started playing clubs around Little Rock. By day, he worked for a firm that sold earthmoving equipment.
The marriage ended a couple of years later, and Jewell joined a band called White Oak. It made a pretty good living on the Dallas-Fort Worth circuit.
In Texas, Jewell married a manicurist named Tene Marlas, who grew up in Paoli and attended Harcum College. Two weeks after their son Buddy was born in 1989, White Oak broke up and Jewell found himself working at the theme park Six Flags Over Texas in a kitschy revue called the Crazy Horse Saloon. "We dressed up in crazy cowboy outfits and told corny jokes and sang Texas swing," he recalls.
In 1993, Jewell's ship was finally about to make land. After winning several rounds on Ed McMahon's syndicated Star Search, the singer optimistically moved his family to Nashville.
"I didn't have the goatee and I was 20 or 30 pounds lighter," he says. "I thought being on a national TV show would be a springboard. It just didn't happen."
Adding to Jewell's disappointment was the realization that he had acquired a nasty drinking and drugging habit. He "got into AA and sobered up. That was 10 years ago," the singer says. "I haven't been to a meeting in several years, but I try to apply the principles on a daily basis. I also got back into church, trying to become the man that God intended me to be."
With his expressive baritone, Jewell got work singing demos, the recordings composers use to market their unsold tunes. In time, he would sing on more than 4,000 demos.
"I think I sound like Randy Owen of Alabama," Jewell says. "But I get a lot of comparisons to Don Willliams, Ed Bruce and Billy Dean."
To support his family, which now included daughter Lacey and another son, Joshua, Jewell held a raft of other jobs, from telemarketing to detailing cars to working for UPS. He kept auditioning, but the labels rejected him over and over as "too country." What they really meant was that he was too old.
"Buddy was over 40, and we've been focusing on the really young ones," says Tracy Gershon, a Sony Nashville executive who was a judge on Nashville Star and is the sister of actress Gina Gershon. "Our industry is too wrapped up in looks."
A church friend saw a notice in the local paper for Nashville Star, but Jewell was reluctant. "I still had a bad taste in my mouth from the Star Search thing," he says. It took a tart pep talk from his wife to get him to the initial audition.
"It was an enormous cattle call, more than 600 people," he says. "It took more than seven hours for me to get heard... . It took six audition processes for me to win the city competition." More than 7,000 other hopefuls engaged in auditions elsewhere.
Eventually 12 singer-songwriters were selected for the series Jewell says "was like Big Brother meets American Idol. They had all 12 of us living in a house on a 24-hour basis, watching how the relationships developed."
The first few cuts were made by a trio of industry judges. Later rounds were determined by viewers' votes. "I thought, 'If I can outlast those three judges, I've got just as good a shot as anyone at winning,' " he says.
Jewell's stolid Everyman quality proved very appealing to the audience. "He isn't model-handsome. He's a loving dad, a good Christian guy," Gershon says. "More importantly, he's someone who had worked really hard and not given up. That's a big glimmer of hope for people."
Since his victory, Jewell's life has rattled along at a fierce pace. The CD was recorded in three weeks. "If that's not in the Guinness Book of World Records," Jewell says, "it should be."
"Originally we scheduled six weeks," Black says. "But the show did so well and Buddy was on fire: They wanted to get the album out much sooner."
The sudden success could shake other men, but Jewell has been around the fairgrounds a time or two.
"He's like a dreadnought, solid in the water," Black says. "He's out there working as hard as he ever did in his life and missing his family more than he ever thought he could, and he still has that look about him that's stable."
It doesn't bother Jewell a bit that he's got a few years on his Horizon competition, Gary Allan, Joe Nichols, Blake Shelton and Darryl Worley.
"A lot of times, I think had I gotten to Nashville when I was younger, I might have accomplished more," he says. "But then I'd have been in my addiction and I know I'd have messed it all up. I think God was waiting for me to get my head screwed on straight."
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Contact staff writer David Hiltbrand at dhiltbrand@phillynews.com.
leflaw
gdZiemann
JohnCarlton02
compmore
purfus
CodeWarrior
ronnie71
I'm not saying this guy is 
