Jimmy Buffett performs in Gulf Shores, Ala., on June 30, 2010. The “Margaritaville” singer-songwriter has died at age 76.
Dave Martin/AP
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Dave Martin/AP
Jimmy Buffett performs in Gulf Shores, Ala., on June 30, 2010. The “Margaritaville” singer-songwriter has died at age 76.
Dave Martin/AP
NEW YORK — Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who popularized seashore bum tender rock with the escapist Caribbean-flavored music “Margaritaville” and turned that celebration of loafing into an empire of eating places, resorts and frozen concoctions, has died. He was 76.
“Jimmy handed away peacefully on the evening of September 1st surrounded by his household, mates, music and canines,” an announcement posted to Buffett’s official web site and social media pages stated late Friday. “He lived his life like a music until the final breath and can be missed past measure by so many.”
The assertion didn’t say the place Buffett died or give a explanation for demise. Sickness had pressured him to reschedule live shows in Could and Buffett acknowledged in social media posts that he had been hospitalized, however offered no specifics.
“Margaritaville,” launched on Feb. 14, 1977, shortly took on a lifetime of its personal, turning into a way of thinking for these “wastin’ away,” an excuse for a lifetime of low-key enjoyable and escapism for these “rising older, however not up.”
The music is the unhurried portrait of a idler on his entrance porch, watching vacationers sunbathe whereas a pot of shrimp is starting to boil. The singer has a brand new tattoo, a probable hangover and regrets over a misplaced love. Someplace there’s a misplaced salt shaker.
“What looks like a easy ditty about getting blotto and mending a damaged coronary heart seems to be a profound meditation on the customarily painful inertia of seashore dwelling,” Spin journal wrote in 2021. “The vacationers come and go, one group indistinguishable from the opposite. Waves crest and break whether or not someone is there to witness it or not. Every part meaning something has already occurred and you are not even certain when.”
The music — from the album “Modifications in Latitudes, Modifications in Attitudes” — spent 22 weeks on the Billboard Sizzling 100 chart and peaked at No. 8. The music was inducted into the Grammy Corridor of Fame in 2016 for its cultural and historic significance, turned a karaoke normal and helped model Key West, Florida, as a definite sound of music and a vacation spot identified the world over.
“There was no such place as Margaritaville,” Buffett advised the Arizona Republic in 2021. “It was a made-up place in my thoughts, mainly made up about my experiences in Key West and having to go away Key West and go on the street to work after which come again and spend time by the seashore.”
The music quickly impressed eating places and resorts, turning Buffett’s alleged need for the simplicity of island life right into a multimillion model. He landed at No. 13 in Forbes’ America’s Richest Celebrities in 2016 with a internet value of $550 million.
Music critics had been by no means very sort to Buffett or his catalogue, together with the sandy beach-side snack bar songs like “Fins,” “Come Monday” and “Cheeseburgers in Paradise.” However his legions of followers, known as “Parrotheads,” often turned up for his live shows carrying toy parrots, cheeseburgers, sharks and flamingos on their heads, leis round their necks and loud Hawaiian shirts.
“It is pure escapism is all it’s,” he advised the Republic. “I am not the primary one to do it, nor shall I most likely be the final. However I believe it is actually part of the human situation that you have to have some enjoyable. You have to get away from no matter you do to make a residing or different components of life that stress you out. I attempt to make it at the least 50/50 enjoyable to work and thus far it is labored out.”
His particular Gulf Coast mixture of nation, pop, folks and rock added devices and tonalities extra generally discovered within the Caribbean, like metal drums. It was a stew of steelpans, trombones and pedal metal guitar. Buffett’s unbelievable ear for hooks and lightweight grooves had been usually overshadowed by his lyrics about fish tacos and sunsets.
Rolling Stone, in a evaluate of Buffett’s 2020 album “Life on the Flip Facet,” gave grudging props. “He continues mapping out his surfy, sandy nook of pop music utopia with the nippiness, pleasant heat of a multi-millionaire you would not thoughts sharing a tropically-themed 3 p.m. IPA with, particularly if his gold card was on the bar when the final spherical got here.”
Buffett’s evolving model started in 1985 with the opening of a string of Margaritaville-themed shops and eating places in Key West, adopted in 1987 with the primary Margaritaville Café close by. Over the course of the following 20 years, a number of extra of every opened all through Florida, New Orleans and California.
The model has since expanded to dozens of classes, together with resorts, attire and footwear for women and men, a radio station, a beer model, ice tea, tequila and rum, dwelling décor, meals objects like salad dressing, Margaritaville Crunchy Pimento Cheese & Shrimp Bites and Margaritaville Cantina Model Medium Chunky Salsa, the Margaritaville at Sea cruise line and eating places, together with Margaritaville Restaurant, JWB Prime Steak and Seafood, 5 o’Clock Someplace Bar & Grill and LandShark Bar & Grill.
There additionally was a Broadway-bound jukebox musical, “Escape to Margaritaville,” a romantic comedy wherein a singer-bartender known as Sully falls for the way more career-minded Rachel, who’s vacationing with mates and hanging out at Margaritaville, the lodge bar the place Sully works.
James William Buffett was born on Christmas day 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and raised within the port city of Cellular, Alabama. He graduated from the College of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and went from busking the streets of New Orleans to enjoying six nights per week at Bourbon Avenue golf equipment.
He launched his first document, “Down To Earth,” in 1970 and issued seven extra on an everyday yearly clip, together with his 1974 music “Come Monday” from his fourth studio album “Dwelling and Dying in ¾ Time,” peaking at No. 30. Then got here “Margaritaville.”
He carried out on greater than 50 studio and stay albums, usually accompanied by his Coral Reefer Band, and was continually on tour. He earned two Grammy Award nominations, two Academy of Nation Music Awards and a Nation Music Affiliation Award.
Buffett was truly in Austin, Texas, when the inspiration struck for “Margaritaville.” He and a good friend had stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant earlier than she dropped him on the airport for a flight dwelling to Key West, so that they obtained to consuming margaritas.
“And I type of got here up with that concept of this is rather like Margarita-ville,” Buffett advised the Republic. “She type of laughed at that and put me on the airplane. And I began engaged on it.”
He wrote some on the airplane and completed it whereas driving down the Keys. “There was a wreck on the bridge,” he stated. “And we obtained stopped for about an hour so I completed the music on the Seven Mile Bridge, which I assumed was apropos.”
Buffett additionally was the writer of quite a few books together with “The place Is Joe Service provider?” and “A Pirate Seems to be At Fifty” and added films to his resume as co-producer and co-star of an adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s novel “Hoot.”
Buffett is survived by his spouse, Jane; daughters, Savannah and Sarah; and son, Cameron.
