Jimmy Buffett loved New Orleans deeply, from Jazz Fest to the Saints to Allen Toussaint

The ethos of Jimmy Buffett boiled down to Key West and New Orleans.

Key West, at Florida’s southernmost tip, supplied the sun, sand and sea that informed his lyrics and lifestyle.

But it was New Orleans that launched his career and nurtured it through the decades via friendships, fun, football and a long-running affiliation with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Buffett died Friday at 76. The announcement on his web site and social media pages didn’t state a cause or a location, only that he was “surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs.”

Buffett was born in Pascagoula and grew up in Mobile. As a child of the Gulf Coast, he was always fascinated by, and attracted to, New Orleans, in part because that’s where his seafaring grandfather often embarked on, and returned from, voyages.

Singer Jimmy Buffett salutes the crowd as he is introduced to sing the National Anthem at the Louisiana Superdome between the San Francisco 49ers and the New Orleans Saints, Sunday Dec. 3, 2006. STAFF PHOTO BY DOUG PARKER

STAFF PHOTO BY DOUG PARKER

In his youth, he attended Sugar Bowl games at Tulane Stadium. As a boy in the late 1950s, Buffett spent a summer at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans. His uncle Jack Rappaport sold 3-D glasses out of an office in the building, which granted young Jimmy access and gave him his first up-close look at show business.

As an aspiring singer-songwriter in the late 1960s, Buffett busked on the streets of the French Quarter, a scene later depicted on the 2011 Jazz and Heritage Festival poster.

The city’s party atmosphere was much to his liking. His hippie-era French Quarter experience set him on his path.

“This is where it all started,” he said from the stage during a 2012 Jazz Fest performance. “New Orleans was my Paris before I got to Paris.”

In 1967, while still a student at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Buffett landed a gig at the now-defunct Bayou Room in the 500 block of Bourbon Street. Players from the new Saints expansion team occasionally showed up.

“I think it was more because we had a hot chick in our band,” Buffett recalled in 2010. “They were more interested in her than in our music.”

He attended the Sept. 17, 1967 regular season opener against the Los Angeles Rams in Tulane Stadium. The Saints’ John Gilliam returned the opening kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown.

TED JACKSON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Jimmy Buffett performs at the Acura Stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Thursday, May 3, 2012.

TED JACKSON

“We thought, ‘This is gonna be easy,'” Buffett later recalled, laughing. Instead, the Saints lost, and continued to lose. His father cussed the TV during games.

Buffett’s fandom only grew deeper over the decades. He often roamed the sidelines at Saints home games and sang the national anthem at least once. In January 2010, he flew his own Falcon 900 jet from the Pacific island of Bora Bora to New Orleans — a commute of 5,400 miles — to watch the Saints beat the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game and advance to the Super Bowl.

En route to the Superdome on game day, he stopped at a Poydras Avenue tailgate party thrown by a coalition of fans called the Down Undas.

Some wore sun visors sprouting a shock of spiky hair, a tribute to the Saints defensive coordinator at the time, Gregg Williams. Buffett offered to get up and sing if someone gave him a visor and a bowl of gumbo.

Deal consummated, he sang “Margaritaville” and Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise” atop a flatbed truck with local swamp pop band the Creole String Beans. “We faked ‘Margaritaville,’ but it didn’t matter,” he later recalled. “Everybody was having a good time.”

He and his buddy Quint Davis, Jazz Fest’s producer/director, proceeded to a suite in the 300 level of the Dome. When Garrett Hartley’s overtime field goal won the game, Buffett wrapped Davis in a tearful embrace.

Saintsations pull a referee uniform off of Jimmy Buffett as he pretends to be a blind NFL referee during his Acura Stage show at the 50th annual Jazz Fest at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, La. Sunday, May 5, 2019.

Advocate Staff photo by CHRIS GRANGER

“It was stunned shock and disbelief, such an emotional thing,” Buffett said. “The game had all the great Shakespearean drama you could want.”

Long after fans poured from the Superdome to celebrate that night, Buffett lay down in the black and gold confetti blanketing the turf. He tossed it around “like the child of Mardi Gras that I am.”

In 2019, he came onstage at the 50th anniversary Jazz Fest costumed as a blind referee, a reference to the infamous “no call” that had cost the Saints a playoff win the previous season. A trio of Saintsations tore the referee stripes off of him to reveal his more typical festival wear.

Jimmy Buffett, who died at 76 on Friday, was passionate about New Orleans.

He tended to perform at Jazz Fest every other year, and frequented the Fair Grounds even in years when he wasn’t booked as a performer. In a baseball cap, aviator shades, polo shirt and shorts, he could roam the grounds largely unnoticed, blending in with legions of other late-middle age attendees.

In the mid-2000s, when the festival was looking for a new production partner, he flirted with the idea of investing in it. That didn’t come to pass, but Buffett was a co-producer of “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” a documentary about the festival shot during the 50th anniversary fest in 2019. It won a Grammy Award for best music film.

He supported Louisiana music in numerous ways. One of his chain of Margaritaville restaurant/music clubs occupied a space on lower Decatur Street for years.

His now-defunct Margaritaville Records released albums by local bands the Iguanas and Evangeline. He often featured southwest Louisiana slide guitarist Sonny Landreth in his Coral Reefer Band.

The late New Orleans legend Art Neville and wife Lorraine got married at Buffett’s house in Key West. Buffett, who occasionally shared stages with Allen Toussaint at Jazz Fest, performed at Toussaint’s 2015 memorial at the Orpheum Theater. He wore a black hat, shirt, pants and sneakers as he strummed a black acoustic guitar for “Fortune Teller.” He grinned through the lyric, “Now I get my fortune told for free,” acknowledging Toussaint’s sense of humor.

But the performance that best captured Buffett’s emotional connection to New Orleans was May 6, 2006, on the second weekend of the first Jazz Fest following Hurricane Katrina.

A week after the storm, on Sept. 5, 2005, he had concluded the first-ever concert at Chicago’s Wrigley Field by dedicating “City of New Orleans” to its namesake.

Eight months later, he opened his Jazz Fest show in the still-devastated city with the same song.

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Saturday, May 6, 2006. A barefoot Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band play on the Acura Stage to end the day. STAFF PHOTO BY CHUCK COOK ORG XMIT: 48766

CHUCK COOK

“That fit my sense of connection,” he later explained. “And how do you musically get to people about something that devastating, and still not preach to ‘em? Some people choose to preach. I choose not to.”

Buffett was essentially the grinning uncle who cracked open the whiskey after the wake. He choked up during the first verse of “City of New Orleans,” but quickly recovered. He reaffirmed his ties to the region, singing about gumbo and crawfish pie. He slipped a reference to FEMA trailers into “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”

“I tried to gear it for New Orleans and do some things that would mean a little something there,” he said. “I also had to be the realist. It wasn’t the place to go down an energy level. I wanted to keep ‘em up.”

Jimmy Buffett had no problem being the life of the party. And New Orleans was the place where he always could be.