DAVID MURDOCK: Jimmy Buffett, storyteller and mogul, charted his own course

It’s early on Sunday morning, Sept. 3, 2023. Normally, I don’t write the column at this time, but I woke up just past midnight from an unsettled sleep. Unsettled because I went to sleep last night with something on my mind that needed writing out, and I didn’t.

Jimmy Buffett died on Friday night. I found out yesterday morning.

As the news trickled out over the course of the day, I read between 40 and 50 articles about Buffett. There was a time when I bought just about every CD he released. Still, I wouldn’t call myself a full-on “Parrothead” — the affectionate term for die-hard Buffett fans. I’ve never been to one of his concerts, but in addition to buying his music, I did buy and read his books, and there’s a “Changes in Latitudes” T-shirt around here somewhere.

Although I’m a casual fan, there wasn’t a whole lot of information in those articles I didn’t already know … except for one really surprising thing.

Forbes magazine estimated his personal worth at $1 billion. That’s astounding. The articles report that much of his fortune came not from record sales, but from concerts and merchandise — everything from T-shirts to restaurants and even a “Margaritaville” themed high-end housing development.

The thing about Buffett that always struck me was how talented a songwriter he was. The man could spin a yarn in a song in a way that was absolutely amazing. His storytelling skill was up there with the greats.

His 1985 greatest hits album is titled “Songs You Know by Heart” … and that’s exactly it. That was the first Buffett album I bought, and it didn’t take long for that title to be true, in a literal sense. My friends and I would belt out those songs, in a rough-and-ready chorus, at the slightest provocation. We knew those songs by heart.

Later, the first box set I ever bought was 1992’s “Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads,” which contains all my favorite Buffett songs. I can’t quite say that I know all those songs by heart, but I was close to it.

Now, I said I wasn’t a full-on “Parrothead,” but I will say this: I read books he alludes to in his songs. For that matter, I’ve even tracked down and watched movies he mentioned, too. In an important, but unobtrusive, way, Buffett affected my taste in books and movies.

The first two lines of the 1981 song “Incommunicado,” for example, are “Travis McGee's still in Cedar Key / That's what John McDonald said.” When I first heard the song, I had no idea who either Travis McGee or John McDonald were, so I asked around until I found out that McDonald is the author of a series of novels featuring the character Travis McGee. I read a few of them and really enjoyed them.

“Incommunicado” also mentions several John Wayne movies, but I’d seen those already. It was the Buffett classic from 1974, “Pencil Thin Mustache,” that really set me a movie challenge. The lines, “I wish I had a pencil thin mustache / The Boston Blackie kind,” were a mystery to me. Who was this “Boston Blackie?”

In pre-Internet days, it took quite a while to find out that Boston Blackie was a character in a series of 1940s movies starring Chester Morris as the title character, a criminal turned detective. It was still at least a decade before I actually saw some of those movies, which aired on TCM.

“Pencil Thin Mustache,” that litany of Baby Boomer memories, provided so much pleasure, tracking down the things Buffett mentions. I still haven’t watched “Sky King,” but I did notice when Gloria Winters, who portrayed the character Penny, passed away. I wouldn’t have known who she was except that Buffett mentioned “Writin’ fan letters to Sky's niece Penny.”

Some of his songs — although they don’t mention specific books or movies — evoke a feeling of an earlier time. The best example of that is “He Went to Paris” from 1973, still one of my favorite Buffett tunes. A concise and heartbreaking portrait of a life, there’s a line in that one that has always gotten to me. Buffett sings, “He went to Paris looking for answers / To questions that bothered him so.” The song ends, and I’ve never been sure if he found the answers.

Still, until yesterday, I’d never seen a photo of him where he wasn’t smiling — a really big smile, too. Even though Jimmy Buffett will forever be remembered as the bard of fun, the troubadour of good times on the beach, I wonder now if that ever-present smile of his was there for another reason. He seemed to have found some kind of answer to the questions that bothered him so. That’s why he smiles.

The photo of him on his Facebook page announcing his death shows him clad in sailing gear, his hand on the rudder of a sailboat. There’s no smile on his face, which surprised me. He’s looking off in the distance with an expression of concentration — he’s steering, so he’s watching his course. That will be the image I remember — the captain steering his course.

Thanks, Jimmy. Fair winds and following seas.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions expressed are his own.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: DAVID MURDOCK: Storyteller and mogul Jimmy Buffett charted his course