I Will Play for Gumbo

I Will Play for Gumbo

By Alison Fensterstock

The guy at the front of the line at the Prejean’s window in Food Area 2 on Jazz Fest’s second Friday of 2014 easily looked like any other baby-boomer Jazz Dad type: T-shirt, cargo shorts, khaki ball cap, sunglasses, backpack, and a pretty nice watch.

The Lafayette restaurant, which would have celebrated 30 consecutive years of serving festivalgoers in 2022 if not for a two-year interruption courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic, makes some of the festival’s unofficial signature dishes. Their pheasant, quail & andouille gumbo and crawfish enchiladas dependably land on foodie roundups of the best of the fest. As usual, that afternoon the booth was slammed. The staffers taking orders and handing back change were far too busy to register that they’d just sold two Styrofoam containers of their famous dark-roux concoction to Jimmy Buffett. He wasn’t even playing the festival that year — he’d just stopped by to hear some music, and apparently, to pick up his own lunch.

By the time the beloved Gulf Coast native and balladeer of beachside pleasures released the song “I Will Play for Gumbo,” which appears on his 1999 top-ten album Beach House on the Moon, it had been a heck of a long time since he actually might have had to do that. As The Times-Picayune noted in its report on his Jazz Fest meal, his reported fee for headlining the festival’s main stage three years before was easily enough for him to have treated everyone on the New Orleans Fair Grounds that day to their own bowl of gumbo — with enough left over for a mango freeze and a rosemint tea, too.

Back in the late ’60s, though, it was a different story. Like a lot of striving young singer-songwriters, he’d gone to landlocked Nashville to knock on the doors of Music Row. After a couple of albums that failed to set the country charts on fire, he drifted back down to the warmer climes and unstressed vibes of the Gulf states, where, as itinerant bohemian musicians have done for centuries, he busked. Like the title character of “Mr. Bojangles,” the 1968 song by his running partner and Texas songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, Buffett performed for drinks and tips in laid-back tourist meccas like Key West — which would become his new home base — and in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where, at the time, hippie folksingers intermingled with beatnik poets, civil-rights organizers and ace players from the traditional-jazz revival scene in coffeehouses, bars and on the street. (The deep Jimmy Buffett cut “Reservation at Preservation Hall” is a paean to that era, name-checking the original Preservation Hall band piano player Sweet Emma Barrett and the “old boys’ sound.” Buffett didn’t play that tune when he made a surprise appearance onstage at the Hall late one Jazz Fest weekend night in 2015, but he did pause between songs to shake up a margarita and auction it off to the delighted Parrot Heads in the crowd, raising money for the venerable jazz club’s nonprofit education arm.)

Jimmy Buffett is a storyteller, and gumbo is, too. Foodways historians trace different elements of its origins to African, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Caribbean and Native American cooking, with ingredients and techniques both native to where gumbo cooks came from and modified by what could be grown, caught, or hunted where they wound up. There’s roux, okra or filé for thickening agents, and rice or potato salad as added starch. Tomatoes are a must for some, and sacrilege to others. Turkey-bone gumbo means Thanksgiving just passed, and gumbo z’herbes means Easter is coming. The Prejean’s gumbo Buffett bought for himself and a lucky friend (or was he planning to eat both servings himself? No judgment), with its quail and pheasant, speaks to the community of game-bird hunters around the restaurant.

Jimmy’s sister and fellow restaurateur, Lucy “Lulu” Buffett, has a Signature Summer Gumbo in her 2017 cookbook Gumbo Love that is full of summer vegetables like okra and tomato, melding garden flavors with blue crab claws and fat, wild-caught Gulf shrimp. Take a spoonful and you can practically see the white sands of Alabama beaches through her chef’s eyes. Like the music — New Orleans funk, jazz, rap and R&B, Lafayette’s Cajun and zydeco ballads and waltzes, Jimmy Buffett’s seaside songscapes — gumbo has terroir.

“I Will Play for Gumbo” is a lighthearted, playful song in a catalog that’s as rich as a good roux with whimsical odes to things like frozen booze, tropical retreats and the famous cheeseburger in paradise (heaven on Earth with an onion slice.) “I don’t smoke, I don’t shoot smack, but I got a spicy monkey riding on my back,” he sings. “It’s a little like religion and a lot like sex — you should never know when you’re gonna get it next.” But it still tells a little story.

Lulu Buffett, who has gumbos on the menu at her three waterfront restaurants in Gulf Shores, Destin and Myrtle Beach, has shared several of her recipes, and the stories behind them, over the years. Regarding his helpless gumbo addiction, in “I Will Play For Gumbo,” Jimmy sings: “It started at my grandma’s, in her kitchen by the sea / She warned me when she told me, ‘Son, the first one’s free.’” Lulu confirmed that with a little more earnestness in an interview with the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun in 2017. “Just about everybody who grew up on the Gulf has a story about their mother’s gumbo, or their grandmother’s,” she told a gumbo reporter. “As kids, we’d go see my grandmother once a week. She’d make all sorts of things: potato salad, cake… But there was always gumbo — and she was a great cook.” Both siblings took something away from grandma’s kitchen; Lulu made gumbo, and Jimmy sang its praises.

Jimmy Buffett appeared on Jazz Fest’s official poster in 2011. Garland Robinette, the longtime WWL-TV and radio host who was enjoying a second act as a successful fine-art portraitist, was hired to paint the image that would represent both the artist and the festival for that year. The crafting of the marquee festival artwork is a collaborative process, during which the painter and Art4Now, the Jazz Fest partner company that’s been producing the posters since the mid-’70s, toss ideas back and forth over the course of months, working to make a collectible image that represents the featured musician, the vibe of New Orleans, and the festival itself. By 2011, of course, Jimmy Buffett was a veritable mega-industry, a brand juggernaut of sun and sandals and salted rims, pirates and parrots and pink crustaceans that had launched restaurants, resorts, cruises, food and liquor products, clothing, and even a satellite radio station.

There was plenty of tropical-paradise imagery Robinette could have used to celebrate the Buffett aesthetic. But instead, he painted the singer as he might have appeared in New Orleans 50 years before — not headlining the Jazz Fest main stage or an arena for tens of thousands of Parrot Heads, but on a French Quarter street corner, in faded jeans and Hawaiian shirt, with the long hair and thick mustache that was his signature look in the ’70s. Still the unknown troubadour with no particular place to go, he’s smiling wide over the acoustic guitar strapped around his shoulders. Its battered case is open by his feet, hopeful that some passerby will stop to hear a verse or two and decide it’s worth throwing in a dollar. The cardboard sign propped up beside it is an anachronistic wink to the future: It reads, “I Will Play for Gumbo.”