I have had cause to remark on more than one occasion recently that many great names from my life are passing on and some at very young ages. Such is the case again today but the impact of this passing is far greater than any I have experienced recently. Jimmy Buffett, my all-time favourite singer-songwriter, passed away yesterday at the all-too-young age of 76. Jimmy was just a few years older than me and his impact upon my life was incalculable.
I first encountered Jimmy’s music in 1974 when his seminal classic “Come Monday” gained extensive airplay on local radio stations here in Australia. There was something captivating about the song, hell, there still IS, and I became a fan immediately.
In the course of time I purchased or was given, all of his albums, firstly on vinyl and later on CD and, even later, in digital format. I learned all of his songs by heart and loved his work.
During the covid lockdowns, Jimmy, and his daughter, Delaney, produced a whole slew of live performances from Jimmy’s lounge room. It was wonderful to hear him talk about how these great songs came to be and the music sustained us through the 12 months or so that he live-streamed his home concerts.
Once free to tour again, Jimmy resumed his hectic concert schedule and was performing right until the end, only cancelling a couple of gigs in the last couple of weeks when he entered hospital for undisclosed reasons. If you get the chance to watch his live performances, do so. How a man of his age could do a two and a half hour concert with a small break in the middle and still be full of energy and enthusiasm right till the end was astonishing.
He was a singer, a songwriter, an actor and a published author. He was an entrepreneur and an extremely wealthy man, appearing on the Forbes rich list due to wise investments and good business decisions.
But it was Jimmy’s music that was the touchstone of his life and he made it abundantly clear that none of his activities that didn’t involve music were as important to him as his music and his performing.
His songs were an eclectic mix that few other songwriters could match. He was once asked why some of his songs were terrific and some of them were trashy and his reply was typically Jimmy. “Well, you see, sometimes I feel terrific and sometimes I feel trashy.”
While he will probably be remembered as a country artist, his output spanned a number of genres and he did them all well. With his resident touring/recording group, The Coral Reefers Band, he did country, rock, reggae, calypso and folk and lots more besides.
His music was very often drawn from his own life experiences and that is, perhaps, why it resonates like it does. There was nothing “second hand” about Jimmy. If he wrote about being drunk, it was because he had often been drunk. If he wrote about lonely, it was for that same reason. His classic “The Captain and the kid”, a song about his own grandfather, resonates today and it is often an item on my performance playlist. I can’t sing it without becoming very emotional as it reminds me of my dad, “He died about a month ago, while Winter filled the air. And though I cried I was so proud to love a man so rare.”
But then there is his trashy stuff, “The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful.” “If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.” “The peanut butter conspiracy” and others. In “This hotel room,” he says, “This morning, I shot six holes in my freezer, I think I’ve got cabin fever.”
In a very real way, one of the lights of my musical life has gone out. Tributes are pouring in from the big and the small, the millions who have been touched by his music.
Here’s one.
