The best-known song from the album, and one of the most notorious, was “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (And Screw)”, a plain-talking, albeit throwaway ditty which celebrated a lifestyle notable for its casual indulgence and heroic lack of political correctness. The first examples of this distinctive hybrid appeared – along with the first incarnation of the Coral Reefer Band – on Buffett’s album A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean, released in 1973. The tropical climate and relaxed, hedonistic lifestyle of the area inspired Buffett to start writing songs that eventually begat his own personal genre known as “Gulf & western”, denoting a combination of country (music) and Gulf Coast (lyric and narrative) influences. In 1971 Buffett went on a busking expedition to Key West in Florida, a place that later became his home and which exerted a telling influence on his musical outlook. After working as a correspondent for Billboard magazine in Nashville, he started his musical career as an acoustic singer-songwriter with a couple of independently released albums, recorded at the start of the 1970s, that gave little indication of the unique musical persona for which he later became known. He grew up in Mobile, Alabama and graduated with a degree in History from the University of Southern Mississippi. James William Buffett was born on December 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Mississippi. And he has toured every year from 1976 to the present with his Coral Reefer Band, performing in beach shorts and bare feet to a legion of fans known as “Parrotheads” who have continued loyally to follow him, sometimes over successive generations in the same family. Since then, in a remarkably consistent career, Buffett has achieved US platinum status for sales of albums including Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes (1977), Son Of A Son Of A Sailor (1978), Fruitcakes (1994), Banana Wind (1996) and Licence to Chill (2004). Now well into his sixties, he has maintained the freshness and popularity of a musical formula which he invented on his major-label album debut, A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean, all the way back in 1973. Buffett has somehow insulated this essentially transient, beach-bum worldview from the passage of time and the encroaching demands of middle-age.

His best-known hits, “Margaritaville” (1977), “Cheeseburger In Paradise” (1978) and “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” (a 2003 duet with Alan Jackson) celebrate an “island lifestyle” of never-ending cocktails, clambakes and carousing by the coast. Jimmy Buffett has created a world of his own.

Jimmy buffett song margaritaville