![]() ![]() “Hope you’re knee deep in the water somewhere in paradise today,” Brown posted Saturday after Buffett’s death, and paid further tribute to him with a cover of “Margaritaville” at a concert that night in New Hampshire. The year before, ZBB and Buffett played Buffett gems like “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and “Margaritaville” for an episode of CMT’s live-music series Crossroads. In 2011, he teamed with Zac Brown Band for “Knee Deep,” his second appearance on a country-radio hit. The video, with Buffett strumming his guitar in a dilapidated Gulf Coast saloon, was in heavy rotation on CMT. He followed it up in 2006 with Take the Weather with You, another country chart-topper led by the radio single “Bama Breeze” that was written not by Buffett, but by Music Row heavyweights Mark Irwin, Josh Kear, and Chris Tompkins. Chesney, Jackson, and Keith all guested, along with George Strait and Clint Black, and it topped the country charts. While Buffett was a Nashville presence back in the Seventies - the first artist to play historic club Exit/In in 1971 - he was now fully in the Music Row orbit.Ī year after the “Five O’Clock Somewhere” juggernaut, Buffett released a proper country album on RCA Nashville, License to Chill. Around the same time as Chesney’s “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems,” he made his own appearance on country radio by guesting on Alan Jackson’s escapist singalong, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” a monster Number One hit that earned Buffett his first CMA Award, for Vocal Event of the Year in 2003. “Tremendous influence on so many of us.” Old Dominion thanked him for “providing countless musicians like us a comfortable, welcoming place to create our own music.” And Sugarland’s Kristian Bush acknowledged Buffett’s overt effect on his boozy new EP of tiki songs, Drink Happy Thoughts.īut Buffett’s sway wasn’t just tangential. Along with tributes from Paul McCartney, James Taylor, and President Biden, there were reams of messages and remembrances from mainstream country artists, all of them bowing to the king Parrothead’s impact.Ĭhesney posted a pre-dawn video of himself singing Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” on an island. ![]() ![]() ![]() That a songwriter born on the Gulf Coast in Pascagoula, Mississippi, could have such an impact on landlocked country singers - like Chesney from Tennessee, Keith and Shelton from Oklahoma, Brown and Bryan from Georgia - was apparent in the hours after Buffett died. “He taught a lot of people about the poetry in just living, especially this kid from East Tennessee.” “Jimmy painted pictures and short stories in all the songs he wrote,” Chesney said in a statement to RS. His success in introducing Buffett’s island attitude to country music helped spawn a crush of similarly sunny hits: Blake Shelton’s “Some Beach,” Toby Keith’s “Stays in Mexico,” Zac Brown Band’s “Toes,” Billy Currington’s “People Are Crazy,” Sugarland’s “All I Wanna Do,” Dierks Bentley’s “Somewhere on a Beach,” Little Big Town’s “Day Drinkin’,” Luke Bryan’s “One Margarita,” Old Dominion’s “I Was on a Boat That Day,” the entire catalog of Jake Owen, and on and on. “No Shoes” altered the trajectory of Chesney’s career and speeded his transformation from a “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” country boy to the Caribbean cowboy he would become on albums like When the Sun Goes Down, Lucky Old Sun, and Hemingway’s Whiskey. Paul McCartney Pays Tribute to Jimmy Buffett: 'He Had a Most Amazing Lust for Life' James Taylor Remembers His Friend Jimmy Buffett: 'You Got to Channel Him' Zac Brown Band Honors Jimmy Buffett With 'Margaritaville' at New Hampshire Concert After first nodding to Buffett a few years earlier in a verse of 1999’s “How Forever Feels,” Chesney buried his feet deep in the sand with the title track of No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems, a 9-to-5 daydream about blowing off work, charting a course for Mexico, and packing “tank tops and flip-flops, if you got ‘em.” (If not? See the song’s title.) While artists like Garth Brooks were mining bits of the tiki-bar sound with songs like “Two Piña Coladas” in the late Nineties, the Buffett big bang in country music can be traced roughly to 2002 with Kenny Chesney’s No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems. Buffett died Friday at 76, leaving an undeniable legacy that is still heard in the songs of country radio and warrants future induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. But sonically, they owe their greatest debt to Jimmy Buffett, whose tropical vibes, beachy imagery, and ocean escapism has shaped the last two decades of mainstream country. Today’s country artists love to namecheck icons like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings in their songs and during interviews. Jimmy Buffett in Concert At L'Olympia - Credit: David Wolff-Patrick/Getty Images ![]()
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