Islanders take note: It’s time to break out your flip-flops and flowered shirts in remembrance of a tropical tunesmith who turned his love of laid-back beach days and upbeat party songs into a $1 billion fortune.
The next time you turn onto Highway A1A, the island’s main thoroughfare, you will be driving on the newly designated Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, so please pause mentally to savor the moment and see if you can hear a calypso melody in the warm, thick air.
With mega-hits like “Margaritaville” and “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” Buffett became synonymous with Key West and Florida more broadly and every member of the Florida State Senate and House present voted in favor of the new designation – liberals and conservatives, freshmen and longtime legislators.
Governor DeSantis signed HB91 into law at the end of June and the Department of Transportation has until Aug. 30 “to erect suitable markers” informing passersby of the road’s new character.
Born in Pascagoula, Mississippi on Christmas Day 1946, raised in Mobile, Alabama, Buffett attended Auburn University, where he took up the guitar to attract girls before flunking out. He eventually got a history degree at South Mississippi University and tried his hand as a writer and musician in Nashville before heading south to Key West in 1972.
There, he “found his true voice as a songwriter,” according to Jimmybuffett.com, merging “his musicality, wanderlust and storytelling” into a brand of island escapism that led to more than 30 albums, including nine certified platinum or multi-platinum, multiple New York Times best-selling books, both fiction and non-fiction, a Broadway musical and successful business ventures ranging from restaurants to resorts to retirement communities, along with video games and casinos. He also created Landshark Beer and licensed “Coral Reefer” brand marijuana.
By the time he passed away at age 76 on Sept. 1, 2023, Buffett had accumulated an easygoing fortune estimated at $1 billion by Forbes.
A humanitarian who supported a wide range of causes and an environmentalist who co-founded Save the Manatee Club, Buffett kept creating new music and memories until the end, completing his final album “Equal Strain on all Parts” just prior to his death from skin cancer, which had been diagnosed three years before.
Hopefully the highway department will put up a cool “suitable marker” right here in Vero Beach to memorialize one of the most colorful and beloved characters in American music in the past 50 years.
So put on that Aloha shirt, pop in a CD and crack a smile the next time you turn on Highway A1A. The official designation does not change addresses on the state highway but will surely improve the drive.