Before Jimmy Buffett spent a lifetime singing about boats, beaches and faraway places, he was shaped by stories much closer to home. That spot was the Alabama Gulf coast. Now, a new exhibit in Mobile brings Buffett back to the waters and people that inspired him. The show is called Jimmy Buffett: Son of a Son of a Sailor. It just opened at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf.
The museum itself is shaped like a ship. A long ramp draws you aboard as lyrics from a Buffett song.
But the first sailor you meet isn't Jimmy. It's his grandfather.
“And so, when you come in, you're you're following Captain Buffett home,” said Museum director Karen Poth.
“And Jimmy's grandfather would tell Jimmy all the all the adventures that he had, and Jimmy wanted to go, and so you know that alone is a huge, you know, is the impact of the Gulf Coast on him,” she said.
Poth spent nearly two years tracing Buffett's roots, including the stories his grandfather brought home from voyages as far as the West Indies. Once he unfolded a map and told Jimmy, "The world is yours if you want it to be. Those stories gave Jimmy his first glimpse of a wider world, one he would spend the rest of his life exploring, then turning into songs.
6000 feet of the museum are devoted to the life that came next. There's concert films, photographs, and artifacts, including an application for sailing lessons at 12. A childhood note takes you back to the boy, asking his parents for a trip to a ball game, saying, "We'll have lots of fun.”
“You get a real look at Jimmy and our family,” said Buffett’s sister Lucy.
From the Jimmy Buffett exhibition at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf
At the exhibit opening, she’s here to welcome visitors.
“He would be so thrilled because Karen and her creative team took a very creative approach to tell a story about a consummate storyteller, and that is not easy to do,” she observed.
Lucy says Jimmy's love of the Gulf Coast stayed with him until the end.
From the Jimmy Buffett exhibition at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf
“The Gulf Coast was with him till the day he died. If he knew those waters and the stories of our family are what made him what he was. So you're getting ready to have such a great treat. Tell everybody about it,” she said.
Outside, a larger-than-life Jimmy Buffett stands in bronze, facing the dock where his family once worked. He's barefoot and smiling, one leg kicked out as if he's crossing a stage.
“Man, that's probably the most challenging part,” said sculptor Benjamin Victor. He spent nine months capturing that familiar energy.
“Imparting that joy in his faith and his aura. You know, like it's just like he he loved people, and you could tell, you could see it,” Victor said.
Buffett's fans are part of the story too. A case holds some of their letters, including a wedding invitation from a couple who met at one of his concerts?
“He said, ‘we're both storytellers. We're we're both songwriters,” said songwriter Mac McAnally. He was only 19 when Buffett heard his debut album and wrote him a note.
It began a friendship, a musical partnership that would last for four decades.
“We're we're going to be friends, and I'm going to sing some of your songs. I bet we make music together, and that was the first that was the first positive input that I got in the music business from somebody that I respected,” McAnaly recalled.
McAnally hopes this exhibit offers young artists something Buffett once gave him:
possibility.
“Having a having a career as a creative person is such a hypothetical notionm” he said.
Poth says the exhibit is permanent, but never finished. It will change and grow as more pieces of Buffett's life find their way home to Mobile, and here, where so many of Jimmy Buffett's stories began, there will always be more to tell.
