There were many Jimmy Buffets—the obituaries and reflections I’ve read today following his death make this much clear.
There was the affable beach bum, the entrepreneur, the best-selling author, the sailor—a universe of people in one person.
My favorite Buffett is pre-Parrothead, before he refined the easygoing persona that he later built a billion-dollar fortune on. It’s the ne’er-do-well singer-songwriter on the sidelines of Nashville.
This Buffett wrote some of my favorite songs. Some of them have the impish humor that would later make him famous—“Pencil Thin Mustache,” “The Great Filling Station Holdup,” “Why Don’t Get Drunk.” Some, though, shine with a lovely melancholic empathy that is harder to hear in his later work—“The Wino and I Know,” “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” “Come Monday,” and, one of my favorites, “He Went to Paris.”
This story song follows a man who goes to Paris (obviously) “looking for answers / to questions that bothered him so.” Buffett doesn’t provide those questions—it’s a fill-in-the-blank proposition for the listener. It’s, y’know, the BIG questions.
But life gets in the way, both for us (or most of us, anyway) as well as for the subject of the song. He leaves Paris, having whiled away a few years, and ends up in England, where he marries and has a child.
And then tragedy strikes—his wife and child die in “the war” (WWII? Buffett doesn’t say) and the man is mired in misery.
But then:
While the tears were a-fallin’ / and he was recalling / Answers he’d never found. / So he hopped on a freighter, / skidded the ocean / And left England without a sound.
He ends up a fisherman in the islands, where he meets Jimmy many years later and tells him his life story.
So what? you might ask. It seems simple enough: a man’s tragic life, scarred by war, so he flees to live in the Caribbean.
And, yes, it is that. But it’s also a parable about the importance of asking those big questions, even if you don’t end up with any answers.
To ask a big question and to then seek the answer is activity that propels a person forward, that makes things happen.
Without asking the big questions, he would never have made it to Paris and then to England and then had a family. Without the questions, he might have languished in England, and not lived the Caribbean life he has when Buffett encounters him.
The song functions as a testament to the power of the searching and curious mind, in the ways it can shift and reshape your life. I have the sense that Buffett—with his many “lives”—understood this himself.
Taylor Coe 