Jimmy Buffett at 60: Still Selling ‘Unsentimental’ Tropical Fantasies

As I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for Jimmy Buffett songs celebrating margaritas, hammocks and sailing odysseys in the tropics. How can you not love a guy who would name an album “Banana Wind”? So I was happy to read yesterday’s appreciation of Buffett in Slate. The sandal-shod singer-songwriter turned 60 last month, and he’s still touring and turning out new albums. Jody Rosen places Buffett in the long tradition of singers evoking tropical fantasies, from Bing Crosby to Don Ho. The difference with Buffett? He is, he writes, identifying something I think is key to his songs’ appeal, “unsentimental and journalistic.”

 

Buffett is not the first American pop singer to sell tropical fantasies. The tradition stretches from Tin Pan Alley’s Hawaiian ballads of the 1910s, to Bing Crosby’s and Elvis Presley’s revivals of the theme, to ‘50s-‘60s exotica and Don Ho, on down through Buffett to country beach bum Kenny Chesney. But where the other performers have mystified the islands, Buffett is unsentimental and journalistic. In admirable detail, his songs depict tourist traps, where the locals exist only to pour your drinks and cheeseburgers in paradise are on the menu. Buffett is unambivalent about this ugly Americanism—he’s all for it. Buffett’s music is often hideously tacky, objectionable on both moral and aesthetic grounds, but you have to give him credit for capturing a milieu and a mindset. He’ll never get the respect given to his generation’s more celebrated troubadours, but he may prove more valuable to future social historians as a chronicler of late-20th-century American folkways. Go to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for poetry and pretty tunes, but if you want to know how baby boomers ate, drank, and screwed on vacation, reach for Boats, Beaches, Bars, and Ballads.

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved