Jimmy Buffett performs in Gulf Shores, Ala., on June 30, 2010. The “Margaritaville” singer-songwriter has died at age 76. Dave Martin/AP conceal caption
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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 mushy 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 night time of September 1st surrounded by his household, mates, music and canine,” an announcement posted to Buffett’s official web site and social media pages mentioned late Friday. “He lived his life like a music until the final breath and will probably be missed past measure by so many.”
The assertion didn’t say the place Buffett died or give a reason for dying. Sickness had pressured him to reschedule live shows in Might and Buffett acknowledged in social media posts that he had been hospitalized, however offered no specifics.
“Margaritaville,” launched on Feb. 14, 1977, rapidly took on a lifetime of its personal, changing into a frame of mind 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 as if 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 little thing which means 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, grew to become 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, principally made up about my experiences in Key West and having to depart Key West and go on the highway to work after which come again and spend time by the seashore.”
The music quickly impressed eating places and resorts, turning Buffett’s alleged want 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 have been by no means very form 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, referred to as “Parrotheads,” often turned up for his live shows sporting 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 feel 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 elements of life that stress you out. I attempt to make it a minimum of 50/50 enjoyable to work and to date 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 light-weight grooves have been typically overshadowed by his lyrics about fish tacos and sunsets.
Rolling Stone, in a evaluation 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 subsequent twenty 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 gadgets like salad dressing, Margaritaville Crunchy Pimento Cheese & Shrimp Bites and Margaritaville Cantina Type 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 referred to as Sully falls for the much more career-minded Rachel, who’s vacationing with mates and hanging out at Margaritaville, the resort 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 every week at Bourbon Avenue golf equipment.
He launched his first report, “Down To Earth,” in 1970 and issued seven extra on an everyday yearly clip, along with his 1974 music “Come Monday” from his fourth studio album “Residing and Dying in ¾ Time,” peaking at No. 30. Then got here “Margaritaville.”
He carried out on greater than 50 studio and stay albums, typically accompanied by his Coral Reefer Band, and was consistently 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 bought to consuming margaritas.
“And I sort of got here up with that concept of this is rather like Margarita-ville,” Buffett advised the Republic. “She sort of laughed at that and put me on the aircraft. And I began engaged on it.”
He wrote some on the aircraft and completed it whereas driving down the Keys. “There was a wreck on the bridge,” he mentioned. “And we bought stopped for about an hour so I completed the music on the Seven Mile Bridge, which I assumed was apropos.”
Buffett additionally was the creator of quite a few books together with “The place Is Joe Service provider?” and “A Pirate Appears 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.
