Sail on, Jimmy. Thanks for the memories

As I write these words, it is early Saturday morning, September 2. Just a few hours ago, my musical hero Jimmy Buffett died.

When I learned the news, I did the same thing I did when my musical hero John Prine died of covid three years ago: I pulled out my guitar and started playing as many of his songs as I knew, fighting back the tears before my throat choked each song to a premature end.

Both Jimmy and John were only about a year older than me—and I have a personal connection to each of them.

John Prine and I lived about four miles apart all through our childhoods in Maywood and Elmwood Park. Though we never met, we hung out at the same places and might have brushed past each other any number of times, like at Skip’s Drive-in on North Avenue, where he worked and I often went to eat burgers. You might say we went to different high schools together.

And although I never lived anywhere close to Jimmy Buffett, he and I were pen pals for a while.

Well, that’s the kind of thing a name-dropper might say. In truth, Jimmy only wrote to me once.

It was about ten years ago, and his note to me came in response to a column I had written about his song “Margaritaville.” I called it the greatest money-making song in history, especially if you consider the pop-culture business empire it spawned, ranging from restaurants to rum, resorts to radio stations, casinos to communities, and everything in-between. Jimmy’s net worth is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion dollars.

And it all started with a goofy song about a guy “wasting away in Margaritaville,” an ironic sad song sung with joyous gusto, that you either love or hate when you hear it on the car radio again… and again… and again….

I explained in my column that, more than a party song, it’s actually a very well-written story in which a down-and-out speaker begins by saying “there’s a woman to blame,” and in only three verses he comes to know “it’s [his] own damn fault.” It’s rare to see such character growth in so few words.

But beyond the character development, Buffett’s writing style could serve as a lesson in a creative writing class. In fact, it has—in my creative writing classes at Maine South High School where I taught more than 20 years ago.

A fundamental creative writing lesson is to “Show, don’t tell.” In other words, engage the senses as much as possible, as Jimmy did in “Margaritaville.” In the song’s first 38 words, every one of the five senses is referenced: the taste of sponge-cake, the smell and sound of shrimp boiling, the sound of a strummed six-string, the sway of a porch swing, the sight, scent, and feel of sun-baked tourists covered in oil.

When I explained all that in my 2013 column, I thought readers might enjoy having their eyes opened to some detail they hadn’t noticed before in a song they knew so well.

I never dreamed that one of those newly enlightened readers would be Jimmy Buffett!

“Dear Kerth,” he wrote to me in an email, “[your column] came across my screen this morning from a friend and co-worker as I got ready for yoga this morning on a day off in Dallas. (These days I’m up about the time I used to go to bed, ha ha). Thanks for the analysis, since I never got around to doing it. I am pleasantly surprised that I nailed all five senses in 38 words.”

Jimmy went on to explain how the song came to be born “before, during and after a plane ride from Austin to Key West. It started with a margarita at a Mexican cantina, on a hot day with a beautiful woman who then drove me to the airport, and ended in a traffic jam on the seven-mile bridge near Marathon, where maybe I did have a vision of the Key West I knew about to change. Key West did change, but hey, so did the rest of the world, and escapism is more vital now than ever.

“The fun now is playing with the lyrics a bit, dropping in local references, re-writing whole verses, like when I fell off the stage in Australia, and basically still having a good time with the song. Forty years later I never think about not doing it. Why? Because it is what people want to hear, and that is what we get paid to do, and enjoy doing. Who else could have a better job?”

And then, he ended his note to me with this:

“Come see us sometime and I will buy you a margarita. Jimmy.”

I never did meet up with Jimmy to have that margarita. Sadly, I never will.

But as I sit here writing these words, I am wearing the Margaritaville shirt that I bought at his gift shop in Disney World long ago. Jimmy’s song lyrics swirl over the sea-blue fabric of the shirt all around my body, embracing me. I don’t wear it as much as I used to, because it is almost 15 years old. It is, you might say, “wasting away.”

But I am wearing it today as I write these words, honored by the memory of a busy billionaire head of a pop-culture empire, who would take the time to drop a friendly line to a two-bit hack.

But that was Jimmy, right? The star on the stage who somehow also seemed to be standing right next to you in the crowd.

Sail on, Jimmy.

You were one of a kind.

You will be missed—but will live on in our memory forever.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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