Jimmy Buffett, 'Margaritaville' Singer, Dead at 76

“He lived his life as a song until his last breath,” read a statement posted Saturday on the singer-songwriter’s social media channels and website.

Jimmy Buffett, the musician and mogul whose smash hit “Margaritaville” became a way of life for legions of devoted Parrotheads, has died. He was 76 years old.

Singer-songwriter, whose new album Equal load on all parts was due to be released later this year, he died with his family and friends around him, a statement was released on his social media and the website was confirmed on Saturday.

“Jimmy passed away peacefully on the night of September 1st surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs,” read the statement – which was accompanied by a touching photo of Buffett sitting on a boat. “He lived his life like a song until his last breath and will be missed by many.”

Buffett was forced to postpone a concert in May after he was hospitalized in Boston “to address some issues that required immediate attention,” he told fans in a statement shared on Twitter.

“Aging is not for pussies, I promise you,” he said. ” I will also promise that when I am well enough to perform, I will be doing so in the land of crab soup. You all make my life more meaningful and fulfilling than I could ever imagine as [tow] a boy with a head sitting on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.”

Jimmy Buffett. Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage

Buffett, who is survived by his wife Jane and children Savannah, Sarah and Cameron, was born on Christmas Day 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and grew up partly in Alabama. He developed a love of musical theater as a boy thanks to his mother, Mary, who spent her free time in a shipyard with the Mobile Theater Guild in Alabama.

“She would always be in productions and take me to shows when they came through town,” he said Entertainment Weekly In 2018, the same year, his own jukebox musical, Escape to Margaritavilleopened on Broadway.

After graduating from college with a degree in history, Buffett worked briefly as a writer for the Board magazine, and also spent several years working on a fishing boat.

He released his first album, Down to Earth1970, but didn’t break through until seven years later, when “Margaritaville” was dropped from the album. Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes, became a hit. The enduring sunshine anthem — which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2016 — helped change the trajectory of Buffett’s career, as it went on to spawn a booming eponymous business that includes everything from resorts and restaurants to apparel and beverages.

Jimmy Buffett hospitalized for ‘problems’ requiring ‘urgent attention’: ‘Aging is not for pussies’

Jimmy Buffett. Adrian Edwards/GC Image

“I wish I could say that some secret plan for world domination was hatched years ago, but I have no idea why or when or how this all happened. I’m not going to dissect it,” Buffett told PEOPLE in 1994. “It would ruin all the fun to be in the middle of it.”

Although Buffett continued to release a steady stream of albums over the next several decades, he became known mostly as a major concert performer, with his annual shows with his Coral Reefer Band raking in millions for the star.

“I put on a good show for my fans. I’m selling Jimmy Buffett to them. I’m one of the few legends left,” he said, according to a 1990 PEOPLE article. “Even if the radio stations won’t play my songs, I can still be happy. I can still say, ‘I fooled them again’.”

Devotees who were almost cult-like became known as Parrotheads and flocked each year to hear Buffett’s signature fusion of country, pop, rock and calypso.

“The most important thing is to please Parrotheads, because music is more than just music,” he told za EW 1995 “It became a lifestyle. I wish I could take credit, but it was created by the fans.”

Buffett has released more than 30 albums during his career, and was nominated for two Grammy Awards, for “Hey Good Lookin’,” his 2004 song with Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, George Strait, Clint Black and Toby Keith, and a duet Alan Jackson’s “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” which was released in 2003. Both that song and “Knee Deep,” which he recorded with the Zac Brown Band, were No. 1 country hits.

In addition to his music, Buffett was a best-selling author and philanthropist who founded the nonprofit Save the Manatee Club in 1981 with then-Florida Governor Bob Graham.

Forbes reported in 2023 that the star is a billionaire and that his assets include an estimated $570 million from touring and recording, a music catalog worth $50 million, and $140 million in planes, houses, and Berkshire Hathaway stock.

Buffett was also an avid pilot, and made headlines in 1994 after his seaplane crashed in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Buffett managed to break through the window of the plane and get out into the water, where he was rescued by two fishermen in a passing motorboat. He wrote in his memoirs from 1998 The pirate looks fifty that he “lived through it thanks to Navy training.”

The musician also recovered in 2011 after falling from the stage during a performance in Australia.

Buffett married his second wife Jane, a former model, in 1977, and the couple are parents to daughters Savannah, a radio personality, and Sarah, and a son Cameron, whom they adopted in the early 1990s.

“I was perfectly comfortable in a woman’s world, or so I thought,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I have two sisters and no brothers. As a child I was very close to my mother. I was well into my thirties before my father and I, waging our own guerrilla war, happily and finally reconciled. Now I lived in the what I then called the International House of Women…Cameron Marley came into our lives at just the right time for all of us Buffetts.”

In the book, he praised his family and friends as “treasures more valuable than gold” and said he believed he was extremely lucky.

“I’ve been called all kinds of things in these fifty years on good old planet Earth, but what I believe I am the most is lucky,” he wrote.

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Source: HIS Education