Jimmy Buffett, ‘Margaritaville’ singer, dies at 76
Jimmy Buffett, the singer, songwriter, author, sailor and entrepreneur whose roguish brand of island escapism on hits like “Margaritaville” and “Fins” made him something of a latter-day folk hero, especially among his devoted following of so-called Parrot Heads, died on Friday. He was 76.
His death was announced in a statement on his website. The statement did not say where he died or specify a cause.
Peopled with pirates, smugglers, beach bums and barflies, Buffett’s genial, self-deprecating songs conjured a world of sun, saltwater and nonstop parties animated by the calypso country-rock of his limber Coral Reefer Band. His live shows abounded with singalong anthems and festive tropical iconography, making him a perennial draw on the summer concert circuit, where he built an ardent fan base akin to the Grateful Dead’s Dead Heads.
Buffett, who performed in the 2022 Monte Rio Variety Show, found success primarily with albums. He enjoyed only a few years on the pop singles chart, with “Margaritaville,” his 1977 breakthrough hit and only single to reach the pop Top 10.
“I blew out my flip-flop/Stepped on a pop-top/Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home,” he sang woozily to the song’s lilting Caribbean rhythms. “But there’s booze in the blender/And soon it will render/That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”
Buffett’s music was often described as “Gulf and western,” a nod to his fusion of laid-back twang and island-themed lyrics, as well as a play on the conglomerate name Gulf and Western, the former parent of Paramount Pictures, among other companies.
His songs tended to be of two main types: wistful ballads like “Come Monday” and “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and clever up-tempo numbers like “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Some were both, like “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” a 1978 homage to Buffett’s seafaring grandfather, written with the producer Norbert Putnam.
“I’m just a son of a son, son of a son/Son of a son of a sailor,” he sang. “The sea’s in my veins, my tradition remains/I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.”
The Caribbean and the Gulf Coast were Buffett’s muses, and nowhere more so than Key West in Florida. He first visited the island at the urging of Jerry Jeff Walker, his sometime songwriting and drinking partner, after a gig fell through in Miami in the early ’70s.
“When I found Key West and the Caribbean, I wasn’t really successful yet,” Buffett said in a 1989 interview with The Washington Post. “But I found a lifestyle, and I knew that whatever I did would have to work around my lifestyle.”
The locales provided Buffett with more than just a breezy, sailing life and grist for his songwriting. They were also the impetus for the creation of a tropical-themed business empire that included a restaurant franchise, a hotel chain and boutique tequila, T-shirt and footwear lines, all of which made him a millionaire hundreds of times over.
“I’ve done a bit of smugglin’, and I’ve run my share of grass,” Buffett sang of his early days trafficking marijuana in the Florida Keys in “A Pirate Looks at Forty.”
“I made enough money to buy Miami,” he went on, alluding to his subsequent entrepreneurial pursuits. “But I pissed it away so fast/Never meant to last/Never meant to last.”
His claim to squandering his wealth notwithstanding, Buffett proved to be a shrewd manager of his considerable fortune; in 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion.
“If Mr. Buffett is a pirate, to borrow one of his favorite images, it is hardly because of his days palling around with dope smugglers in the Caribbean,” the critic Anthony DeCurtis wrote in a 1999 essay for The New York Times. “He is a pirate in the way that Bill Gates and Donald Trump have styled themselves, as plundering rebels, visionary artists of the deal, not bound by the societal restrictions meant for smaller, more careful men.”
(The comparison to Trump here is strictly economic; Buffett was a Democrat.)
Buffett was also an accomplished author, one of only six writers, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Styron, to top both the Times’ fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists. By the time he wrote “Tales from Margaritaville” (1989), the first of his three No. 1 bestsellers, he had abandoned the hedonistic lifestyle he had previously embraced.
“I could wind up like a lot of my friends did, burned out or dead, or redirect the energy,” he told The Washington Post in 1989. “I’m not old, but I’m getting older. That period of my life is over. It was fun — all that hard drinking, hard drugging. No apologies.”
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