J.D. was born in Greenville, Mississippi, a town also notable for being the birthplace of Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, on the same day Richard Nixon was elected president. He is of Irish-French-German-Cherokee-Choctaw descent, being the oldest of seven siblings.
J.D. attended 17 different schools, moving back and forth between his mother and father, before eventually settling down. His great-great-great-great uncle was Horace Mann, the founder of the American Public School system.
His father, affectionately known as "Puddin," is a welder, artist, amateur archaeologist, and inventor. His mother, Sally, has had a variety of professions, including concert promoter and owner of a country-western nightclub called The Headless Horseman.
As a child, J.D. spent many school nights until the wee hours of the morning hanging out backstage and onstage with famous musicians such as Hank Williams, Jr., Juice Newton, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Paycheck, David Allen Coe, and Ray Price at his mother's nightclub.
After a brief stint in college, J.D. served in the Marine Corps for 15 months, stationed in California. Following his military service, he returned to Mississippi and worked as a debt collector for his mother's collection agency.
However, J.D. soon realized that debt collecting was not his calling and decided to return to college to pursue a degree in theatre at the University of Southern Mississippi. Once on stage, he knew that acting was his true passion.
In his second year of theatre, J.D. was one of 20 finalists selected to attend the Southeastern Theatre Conference. In 1995, a friend offered him a lead role in a play at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica, California, and J.D. took the opportunity, leaving college a semester before graduating.
Since then, J.D. has lived between Hollywood, California, Austin, Texas, and Oxford, Mississippi, where he recently completed writing and directing his first independent feature film, Glorious Mail (2005).
Despite his appearances on game shows and near-misses in landing lead roles in major films, J.D.'s friends believe he is almost one lucky son of a gun. In 2004, his luck proved true when he won an artist's print worth $80 in a raffle, coming in second place in United Way's New Home Giveaway, where the grand prize was a $250,000 house.
