Jimmy Buffett didn’t grow up in the Florida Keys, but his music has come to be synonymous with the laid-back, boozy lifestyle of tropical seaside living. Born in Mississippi and raised in Mobile, Alabama — not far from Florida’s “Emerald Coast” on the Gulf of Mexico — the singer-songwriter’s signature song, “Margaritaville,” was partially inspired by real events.

Music producer Norbert Putnam, who got his start as a session player in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in the mid-1960s before moving to Nashville where he evolved from a musician to a producer, told Sound on Sound that Buffett approached him at a restaurant and said, “I gotta talk to you.”

The two men had some drinks, and as Putnam explained, “[Buffett] wanted to do something more progressive, and he wanted me to do it with him. And he wanted to use his band, the Coral Reefers. I thought, this is tragic — I had just been through this with the New Riders … A bunch of coked-out musicians behind Jimmy singing songs about his grandfather and the ocean.”

However, the idea grew on Putnam. “Look, if you want to make records about the ocean, you have to get next to the ocean,” he told Buffett. So, they booked recording space in Miami and went to work on Buffett’s eighth studio album (if you include 1975’s “Rancho Deluxe Movie Soundtrack”), “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” where the song “Margaritaville” was first released.

Margaritaville is now a multibillion-dollar industry

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