RIP, Jimmy Buffett: Confessions of a Catholic ‘Parrot Head’
This past December, I had the opportunity to see Jimmy Buffett in concert in Orlando, Florida. By my reckoning, the 2020s is my sixth decade during which I have heard Jimmy perform. As a convert to Catholicism, I am filled with gratitude for how Jimmy’s music has enriched my life
Growing up in Florida during the 1970s, Jimmy’s music was always in the background. As a teenager, I made frequent trips to Anna Maria Island with my relatives and friends. Listening to Jimmy on fishing trips and beach excursions was as natural as hearing the tide come in. His music, now as then, caught the mood and atmosphere of old Florida. For me, that meant cast-netting mullet with my Uncle Howard, catching lobster in the Florida Keys, drifting across the chain-of-lakes in my hometown of Winter Haven, and enjoying sunsets with my extended family on Anna Maria. Jimmy’s music evokes and complements all of these realities.
The first concert
I attended my first Jimmy Buffett concert in Lakeland, Florida in the waning days of the 1970s—and two concerts there in the early 1980s—when I was a high school student in Winter Haven. I recall that on concert Fridays my friends and I never attended class, but instead prepared ourselves for the shows by hanging out at a pool all day. This party attitude, present at every Jimmy Buffett concert, encapsulates what many people perceive to be the central impulse of Jimmy’s music.
As I learned in the ensuing years, it is not so. For while some of Jimmy’s tunes have hedonistic overtones, his music is almost always ordered toward the building of genuine fellowship among friends. As he says in “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” “Ran into a chum with a bottle of rum and we wound up drinkin’ all night.” The “bottle of rum” and the “drinkin’ all night” do not mean anything without the “chum” that you first run into! While my lack of maturity prevented me from fully receiving Jimmy’s music in my high school years, I was drawn to this sense of camaraderie that it promotes and celebrates.
