jIMMY'S bIO
jimmy...
Buffett was born on December 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and spent part of his childhood in Mobile, Alabama. He is the son of Mary Lorraine (née Peets) and James Delaney Buffett, Jr...
During his grade school years, he attended St. Ignatius School, where he played the trombone in the school band. Buffett's grandfather was a sailor, therefore he was exposed to sailing as a child, which had an early effect on his life and later in his music. He later lived in Fairhope, Alabama. He graduated from McGill Institute for Boys in 1964. He began playing guitar during his first year at Auburn University before continuing his college years at Pearl River Community College and the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS, where he received a bachelor's degree in history in 1969. He is an initiate of Kappa Sigma fraternity at the University of Southern Mississippi. After graduating from college, Buffett worked as a correspondent for Billboard magazine in Nashville, breaking the news of the separation of Flatt and Scruggs.
Jimmy began his musical career in Nashville, Tennessee during the late 1960s as a country artist and recorded his first album, the folk rock Down to Earth, in 1970. During this time, Buffett could be frequently found busking for tourists in New Orleans. Country music singer Jerry Jeff Walker took him to Key West on a busking expedition in November 1971, jimmy then moved to Key West and began establishing the easy-going beach-bum persona for which he is known. He started out playing for drinks at the Chart Room Bar in the Pier House Motel. Following this move, Buffett combined country, rock, folk, and pop music with coastal as well as tropical lyrical themes for a sound sometimes called "Gulf and Western".
Jimmy Buffett began calling his music "drunken Caribbean rock 'n' roll" as he says on his 1978 live album You Had To Be There. Later, Jimmy himself and others have used the term "Gulf and Western" to describe his musical style and that of other similar-sounding performers. The name derives from elements in Buffett's early music including musical influence from country, along with lyrical themes from the Gulf Coast, and instruments such as steel drums from the Islands of the Caribbean. A music critic described Buffett's music as a combination of "tropical languor with country funkiness into what some have called the Key West sound, or Gulf-and-western." The term is a play on the form of "Country & Western"
Today, he is a regular visitor to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts and other islands where he gets inspiration for many of his songs and some of the characters in his books.
Jimmy also owns a home in St Barts, a Caribbean island where he lived on and off in the early 1980s while he was part owner of the Autour de Rocher hotel and restaurant. He spends part of the summer traveling about the East Coast on his sailboat. An avid pilot, Buffett owns a Dassault Falcon 900 airplane that he often uses while on concert tour and traveling worldwide. He has also owned a Boeing Stearman, Lake Amphibian, and Grumman Albatross...
Jimmy married Margie Washichek in 1969 and divorced in 1971. He spent years working as the first mate on the yacht of industrialist Foster Talge on the Petticoat III in Key West while perfecting the "Caribbean Rock n' Roll" genre. Jimmy and his second wife, Jane (née Slagsvol) have two daughters, Savannah Jane and Sarah Delaney, (Sarah was almost named Sara Loraine, after his mother, but was named Sarah Delaney after his father), and an adopted son, Cameron Marley, and reside in Sag Harbor, New York. They separated in the early 1980s, but reconciled in 1991.
His father died May 1, 2003, at the age of 83. His mother died a few months after her husband, on September 25, 2003
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In 2015, Jimmy Buffett spoke at the University of Miami's graduation ceremony and received an honorary doctorate in music. Wearing flip flops and aviator sunglasses, he told graduates, in a paraphrase of his song "The Pascagoula Run", that "it's time to see the world, time to kiss a girl, and time to cross the wild meridian."Politically, Buffett is a Democrat.
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