Jimmy Buffett’s Texas Connections: The Mayor of Margaritaville Had Texas in His Heart (Sep 17, 2023)

Sunday, September 3, turned into a somber day when those who call ourselves “Parrottheads” awoke to the sad news that Jimmy Buffett had passed away the night before. I know that I had finished my series on Texas music, but the death of the man one commenter once called “A one man Spring Break” deserved a column, if for nothing else to allow me to remember him.

James Delaney Buffett was a native of Alabama, moved to and became synonymous with Key West when he began his music career, and later in life split his time between homes in West Palm Beach, FL, and Sag Harbor, NY. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for him to have a firm connection to Texas, or at least it does not on the surface. However, Buffett and Texas shared many memories and bonds. As he once sang on his song “Migration” from his A1A album, “Got a Caribbean soul I can barely control and some Texas hidden here in my heart.”

Texas first appears in the Jimmy Buffett storyline in the form of iconic Texas musician Jerry Jeff Walker. After graduating from Southern Mississippi University—with a degree in History, I must add—Buffett decided to try his hand at the music business by moving to Nashville, where he went to work as a reporter for Billboard magazine by day, a struggling musician playing in small clubs at night, and trying to write songs in between. Walker had already gained a degree of fame for writing “Mr. Bojangles,” and Buffett was a fan. He made it a point to meet Walker one night at an ASCAP reception. Walker at the time was living in Coconut Grove in Florida, and he invited Buffett to come see him. Buffett’s career was floundering in Nashville, as was his first marriage, so one day he appeared at Jerry Jeff’s doorstep. He stayed a few days in Walker’s guest house, and the two worked on Walker’s old 1947 Packard, which Jerry Jeff had wrecked. When it was fixed, Walker proposed a “road trip,” and the two ended up in Key West. Buffett, as he later sang, “had found him a home.” He got a job at the Chart Room playing for tips and began to refine his unique sound. As he said in an article after Walker’s passing in 2020, “Would I have gotten to Key West if it wasn’t for Jerry Jeff? Probably. But, it was much easier because of him.” He and Jerry Jeff also wrote a song together, “Railroad Lady,” which both placed on albums.

Buffett made a name for himself in Key West, and when he released his first chart record, “Come Monday,” in 1974, he began to build a national following. Buffett recalled in an interview in 1994 that one of the biggest boosts to his career was when another Texas icon, Willie Nelson, invited him to be a performer at his first 4th of July Picnic in 1973. Buffett had also met Nelson in Nashville, and through Walker and another Texas musician, Michael Martin Murphy, he reconnected with Nelson after he left Nashville and moved to Austin. Buffett had played a few gigs in the Austin area, and after one, Nelson found him and said, “I’m having a thing on July 4th. What do I have to do to get you there?” Buffett committed right there, and he appeared at the first three Independence Day events.

Jimmy Buffett’s signature song is “Margaritaville,” an ode about a man who got lost on a bender of some kind and wasn’t sure how it all happened. What you may not know is that Buffett conceived the song not in Key West, or some distant Caribbean island, but in a bar in Austin, and Jerry Jeff Walker also appears again. Buffett had played a concert one night, had a little time to spend before his next one, and spent a good portion of it drinking Margaritas at “Lung’s Cocina del Sur” on Anderson Lane. Walker had moved to Austin by that time, and Jimmy spent the night with him. He began thinking of the tourists he saw in Key West, the way one could get “lost” in an alcohol haze, and he jotted down a few lines. When he returned to Key West, he told his record producer, Norbert Putnam, that he was “tinkering with a song when he was down in Austin about someone who drinks too many Margaritas.” He sang the first lines to Putnam about the time he “lost a flip-flop, stepped on a beer top, and then when he got home he had made a Margarita, but he couldn’t find any salt.” Putnam looked at him and said, “That’s a terrible idea for a song.” Buffett wrote it anyway, and it became the basis of a multi-billion-dollar empire.

Buffett once told a story during a talk show that he thought his career was essentially over in the mid-1980s, but one thing that kept it going—and “kept some dollars in the bank”—was that he could always count on getting gigs in Texas, where enthusiasm for his songs continued. He said that shows along Texas’ Gulf coast and in the state’s college towns kept his “feet in the game” until his career revived once again in the 1990s. The spirit of that time in his life was the inspiration for his song “Who’s the Blonde Stranger” on his 1984 “Riddles in the Sand” album. He begins the song, “Nothing like this way out in West Texas/Galveston Bay is a whole other world. . ./” The song tells the story of a man and wife who have flings with these “strangers who live by the sea.” Finally, Buffett cemented his “Texas connection” when he appeared on a show with Alan Jackson and George Strait at the Dallas Cowboy’s stadium home in Arlington in 2007. An estimated 80,000 people showed up for the concert, which also became a live album. Buffett said it was the largest crowd he had ever played for. Perhaps it was fitting that it came in Texas.

Rest in Peace, Jimmy. We Parrottheads will miss you. But as you also once said, “I’ve never sang a sad song. It just not in my nature.” So, we will try not to be sad at your passing.

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.