(Frankly, Buffett hasn’t done that well with a record in a long time.) A smooth sailing book of infinite imagination, Tales From Margaritaville hit No. The meeting between the songwriter and the fisherman is the emotional apex of Tales From Margaritaville (Fictional Facts and Factional Fiction) ($16.95, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), Buffett’s debut book ofshort stories. Although the project gave Buffett the chance to meet Fuentes and sing “Havana Daydreaming” in the La Bodeguita del Medio bar in Havana (a legendary haunt of Fidel Castro and Hemingway), the documentary was never released and no one was paid.īut Buffett’s tango with Fuentes is priceless.

Several years ago, singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett was part of a group assembled by Margaux Hemingway to produce a documentary retracing the steps of Papa Hemingway in Cuba. Fuentes is the Cuban fisherman who was the subject of Ernest Hemingway’s epic The Old Man and the Sea. Like a piece of driftwood embedded in the seashore, the gnarled image of Gregorio Fuentes is etched in the mind. With unforgettable stories that present the true roamers twin loves–the sea and the road–Tales from Margaritaville is one “smooth sailing book of infinite imagination” Travel along with a cowboy named Tully Mars, as he heads from Heartache, Wyoming, to Graceland, and relive the autobiographical odyssey of a third-generation sailor and first-rate musical outlaw. Tales from Margaritaville is a collection of short stories (some purely fiction, some based in truth) so vividly packed with restless dreamers, wild wanderers, and pure gypsy souls that just reading it is a wild adventure. Margaritaville may not appear on a map, but it does exist–at least in the brilliantly creative, sometimes slightly skewed imagination of Jimmy Buffett.

The book peaked at #6 on the New York Times Bestsellers List for the week of November 5, 1989.

Jimmy’s second book (and first as sole author).

Tales from margaritaville