I was so out of touch with popular culture in 1977 that when a young woman requested “Margaritaville” I didn’t know what she was talking about. I was busking in Harvard Square with my friend Rob Forbes playing washboard, and she was there with a much older man, who I assumed was her father. Rob dismissed that notion as typically naive, but as it turned out, it was her father, and somehow we ended up at her place a few days later, and she played us the Buffett record, and I think Rob may have dated her for a while. Her name was Heidi.

That was that, for the time being, since we went off to Europe at the end of the summer and Buffett hadn’t hit over there. I probably got my next taste in the mid-1980s, when I hitchhiked down the East Coast and along the Gulf Coast to Mexico — which meant I was mostly traveling through Buffett country, and disappointed a lot of people by not having a repertoire of his songs.

I may have learned this during that trip, or maybe when I got back home. In any case, I picked up two or three of his albums and liked them, and learned a half-dozen of his songs. I’ve already posted “The Peanut Butter Conspiracy,” and will definitely be posting “He Went to Paris,” and maybe “Miss You So Badly,” which I played for a while but am not sure I remember all the way through…

…and I’ve never performed “Margaritaville,” because it was so overdone, but when I got into Congolese guitar I found that this fell really nicely under my fingers; Buffett’s mix of Caribbean rhythms and country-western was exactly the sort of thing the Congolese acoustic players liked, and I’ve enjoyed picking this for more than forty years. The lyric is admittedly pretty silly, especially the pop-top/flip-flop verse, but in a relaxed, lazy, Buffett way, and it’s fun to sing. Apparently he wrote it in Austin, Texas, feeling homesick for Key West, and sounds like it.

Which brings me to Steve James, my buddy in Austin — later in Seattle, and now gone, but I stayed with him a bunch of times in Austin and almost blew up his house once by leaving one of the gas burners slightly on, which feels like the kind of thing the singer of this song would do. Steve always liked my pseudo-Congolese guitar arrangements — we first bonded over my version of “Iko Iko” — and was particularly amused by this one. He was always annoyed by folkies and blues fans who self-righteously avoided the Top Forty, and was charmed that I’d demonstrate the adaptability of what I’d learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda with a megahit Buffett song. (For some reason, I’ve found this style matched several major hits: previous posts with fingerpicked rumba accompaniment include “He’ll Have to Go” and “Under the Boardwalk.”) So, this one’s for Steve, and the shirt I’m wearing in the video was one of his; I’ve never worn guayaberas, but he liked them and I inherited this one, and it fits the song.