Ferdinando "Fred" Buscaglione was born in Turin on November 23, 1921, to a house-painter father and a mother who worked as a building concierge and gave piano lessons, both from the village of Graglia. At eleven he was admitted to the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin and left after three years, uninterested in the classical curriculum and needed at work by a family with little money. He took jobs as a delivery boy and a dental technician's apprentice and learned his trade at night. By his teens he was singing jazz in Turin nightclubs and playing double bass and violin, and Italian sources add piano and trumpet.

Jazz reached him early. On January 15, 1935, when he was thirteen, he went to Louis Armstrong's concert at the Teatro Politeama Chiarella in Turin with a friend, the accordionist Renato Germonio. The two later worked as an accordion duo, and Buscaglione moved in the circle around the Hot Club Torino, the city's jazz society. In the late 1930s and early 1940s he played double bass in small orchestras at venues such as the Fortino, the Stadium and the Hotel Ligure, and a law student named Leo Chiosso, who loved crime novels, heard him at the Gran Caffè Ligure and became his lyricist for life.

Italy entered the war in June 1940 and Buscaglione was called up and posted to Sardinia. Captured by the Americans, he was allowed to join the orchestra of the Allied radio station in Cagliari, which gave him access to American music that the Fascist regime had banned. With the brothers Franco and Berto Pisano he led the Quintetto Aster, which played for the Allied radio and for Radio Sardegna.

Back in Turin after the war he played bass in dance-hall orchestras, taking violin solos and singing standards. Italian Wikipedia credits him as the double bassist, under the name Nando Buscaglione, on the 1946 78 rpm Body and Soul / Don't Get Around Much Anymore by the Complesso Swing sotto l'egida dello Hot Club Torino; the label notes say it was recorded on May 6, 1946. The wartime quintet became the Asternovas, with trumpeter Giulio Libano and saxophonist Sergio Valenti among its members, and the group worked nightclubs across Europe, starting from a Swiss engagement in 1948. In Switzerland in 1949 he met the performer Fatima Robin's, who later became his wife and sang beside him on stage. His first recordings, in 1952 for La Voce del Padrone, were jazz standards, and no label then wanted the original songs he and Chiosso were writing.

The turn came with Gino Latilla, a Cetra recording artist who had scored a hit with "Tchumbala-bey," written by the Chiosso and Buscaglione team, and who pressed the label's director to record them. The result was a 78 rpm single in 1955, "Che bambola!!" backed with "Giacomino," which sold close to a million copies with almost no promotion. The stage character was complete by then: a pinstriped, mustachioed tough guy with a wide-brimmed hat, drawn from Clark Gable, from Mickey Spillane and from the gangsters of Damon Runyon's stories, singing comic songs about Chicago, whisky and women with the Asternovas behind him. Cetra released ten-inch LPs with the group from 1956 to 1958 that mix his own songs with standards such as "Making Whoopee," "Margie" and "Too Marvelous for Words," and he scored a run of hits with Chiosso including "Teresa non sparare," "Eri piccola così," "Whisky facile" and "Love in Portofino."

By 1959 he was everywhere in Italian entertainment, in advertising, on television and in a run of films that included I ladri, I ragazzi del juke-box, Poveri milionari and, opposite Totò and Scilla Gabel, Noi duri. In the early hours of February 3, 1960, at 38, he was driving his Ford Thunderbird toward his hotel in Rome when he collided at a crossing with a Lancia Esatau truck loaded with porphyry. The truck driver flagged down a bus to carry him to hospital, and he was gone when it arrived. Hours earlier he had dined with friends and met Mina, who had made her Sanremo Festival debut, and the two had talked about working together. Tens of thousands attended his funeral in Turin on February 6, and he is buried in the city's Cimitero Monumentale. Noi duri opened on February 24 and ran for months.

His songs outlived the character. In 1980 RAI marked the twentieth anniversary of his passing with a tribute in which several singers performed his hits with an orchestra led by Gorni Kramer. In 2008 he was named one of the immortals of the "Pantheon of Italian Swing," part of the Sultanato dello Swing project created by Freddy Colt under the patronage of the pianist Stefano Bollani. Raphael Gualazzi issued an EP of his songs, Buonasera, Fred!, in 2021, and on December 5, 2023 the stage show Fred!, directed by Arturo Brachetti, opened at the Teatro Carignano in Turin with trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso among the participants. A commemorative plaque was unveiled on April 4, 2025 at the building in Via Bava where he lived and wrote.

Buscaglione was a nightclub entertainer first and a jazz musician second, and the jazz is the foundation rather than the headline. The records are swing in the Italian dance-band manner: a small combo with trumpet and saxophone, a rhythm section, a leader who also played bass and violin, and a repertoire that sets Chiosso's comic originals beside American standards, mambos and the occasional rock and roll number. Discogs files most of his releases under Jazz and Swing. The posthumous Ricordo di Fred (1960) includes an unreleased double bass solo and the standard "Ain't Misbehavin'" alongside his own hits, which is the clearest document of the instrumentalist behind the persona.

The jazz lineage is documented in his youth rather than inferred. He heard Louis Armstrong in Turin at thirteen, absorbed the Hot Club Torino scene, and learned American swing and big-band sounds on the Allied radio in Sardinia when the music was banned at home. The persona itself came from American crime fiction and film, not from a jazz source, and the humor is what sold the records. He mattered for later Italian swing: Sergio Caputo and Tonino Carotone are among those who cite or echo his manner, and Raphael Gualazzi recorded a whole EP of his songs.