Jimmy Buffett is Dead, But His Music Lives on in My Soul

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We've lived in Texas for 35 years, and yet I'm still a Florida girl at heart. That's why the Sept. 1 death of singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett has devastated me as much as if he were a member of my own family. His music touched my soul and the souls of many of my closest friends.

Buffett's songs were the soundtrack of my life from high school onward. Compared to many, mild was the misspending of my youth (once a church girl, always a church girl), but it nonetheless had a wilder aspirational soundtrack of Buffett's songs. While he's most remembered for his beach-bum anthem "Margaritaville," the songs on his albums reflected more profound observations on life in tropical climes, and later life in general.

Name an early Buffett song and I can probably sing it from memory: "Living and Dying in 3/4 Time," "Cheeseburger in Paradise," "Pencil Thin Mustache," "A1A," "A Pirate Looks at Forty," "Migration," "Come Monday," "Tin Cup." I even memorized Buffett's take on the Lord Buckley comedy routine, "God's Own Drunk," and performed it well enough to win third place in a talent competition on the TV-themed Caribbean cruise. I still have the award plaque displayed in my living room.

The obituaries I've read thus far say that Buffett's music was popular for its "beach party" tunes and steel-drum rhythms, but there was a serious undercurrent to his songs. We resonated to that "beach bum rock n' roll" as Jimmy himself termed it, especially as we reached middle age. That's when lyrics like "made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast" became more real than in our youth. While some of us criticized Buffett for selling out commercially – his business empire based on tropical themes earned him millions – we still secretly wished we'd parlayed our own sea-sun-sand lifestyle into wealth.

Buffett's songs reached a deep-down heartstrings level that matched our life trajectories. We were competent in maturity, but somehow the later Buffett tunes lacked the giddy imagery of our youth. Frankly, as life with its many responsibilities weighed upon me,I lost track of the albums Buffett and the Coral Reefers made much past "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes," with its signature song, "Margaritaville." Personally, I prefer to listen to the album's "Banana Republic," with its expose' lyric, "expatriated Americans, feeling so all alone, telling themselves the same lies that they told themselves back home."

Now we've reached the age of "Migration," as in, "most of the people who retire in Florida are wrinkled and they lean on a crutch." I don't have a crutch, but I do have a walking stick, and even a wheeled walker that I need for traveling long distances on foot. Somehow, I never thought I would need such assistive devices; perhaps my inner Buffet soundtrack deluded me into thinking I'd never grow old.

Part of me still hasn't grown old. The motto on my Facebook page – "Got a Caribbean soul I can barely control, and some Texas hidden here in my heart" – is as apt as ever. It's just my body that's bearing the marks of time, not my soul. For me, that's Jimmy Buffet's greatest legacy, that attitude of "JOY!" in simply being alive to relish a good time with friends and a brew or two. Except now that joy is tinged with grief that the singer of my heart songs no longer lives to make his music on earth.

Jimmy's death at age 76, just six years older than my friends and I, reminds me, reminds us, that even the heartiest partiers among us will one day die. What matters, as Buffett sang so often, is that life needs joy as much as it needs purpose, and that sometimes a worthy purpose can be as simple as reveling in God's glorious sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico.

No better epitaph exists for Jimmy Buffett than his own lyrics:

"But we're doing fine, we can travel and rhyme, and know we've been doing our part.

"I got a Caribbean soul I can barely control, and some Texas hidden here in my heart."

Veteran award-winning religion journalist Cynthia B. Astle has covered The United Methodist Church at all levels for 35 years. Today she wishes she was back on Sand Key enjoying life with her friends.