I was staying at the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Hollywood, Florida, when the news broke that Allen Toussaint had died in Spain. I grabbed my iPod, got a cup of coffee from the Margaritaville Coffee Shop, and went for a walk on the beach listening to The Bright Mississippi.
A few months earlier, I’d met Mr. Toussaint in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Portland. I’d been instructed to call his drummer and son-in-law, and he’d put me in touch with Mr. Toussaint, who emerged from the elevator in a resplendent blue suit and said, “How can I help?”
I wanted to talk about New Orleans and his long friendship with Buffett. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon well spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Buffett organized a show. CMT broadcast from the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Among his guests, he brought Will Kimbrough, Toussaint, and Jesse Winchester, who danced quite the jig while singing “Rhumba Man.”
After the television broadcast, Buffett and the band returned to the stage and ripped into Kimbrough’s “Piece of Work.” They did “Biloxi” with Winchester. And Toussaint returned to play a song he’d written called “I’m Gonna Hang with Jimmy Buffett.”
“It seems like I’ve been on him forever,” Toussaint told me when I asked how long he’d been friends with Buffett, “but that’s not so. He has such a bright spirit. By the time I got to know Jimmy, ‘Margaritaville,’ was already making the world happy.”
Toussaint wrote and produced pages of the American songbook. He wrote “Yes We Can Can.” He produced the Meters. He wrote “Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (From Now On).” Find a cooler song than that. I dare you.
Toussaint was responsible for so many of those hits drifting from New Orleans to Buffett’s grandparents’ house in Pascagoula. As Toussaint’s website still says, if Professor Longhair was New Orleans’s Bach, Toussaint was its Mozart. He’d made the world happy a few hundred songs over and had the license plate on his Bentley to prove it: SONGS. How had he come to write one about Buffett?
“I was looking at TV one day, and the news, as news is so many times, the people were hustling and bustling, and things were not coming all together,” he said. “There were so many conflicting things going on, and I thought about Jimmy Buffett and the persona he presents, not fake at all. He lives his heart. His heart is out there and he shares it with the people. I was thinking, rather than all this stuff, I was going to hang with Jimmy Buffett.”
He tapped a rhythm on his knee as he began to recite the lyrics, his recitation more musical than most albums. Toussaint could blink an earworm. “Grinding at the grinding stone grinding away,” Toussaint said. “Gotta make another buck no time to play.”
Ah, but he saw some birds flying south and pointing the way to where they serve the blues beater, “that famous margarita.”
At Toussaint’s memorial service, among New Orleans legends, Buffett got up dressed in black and played “Fortune Teller” one more time, just as he’d played it on street corners in the French Quarter when no one knew who he was, or cared.
Toussaint embodied the spirit of New Orleans the way Buffett grabbed that brief period of time in Key West’s history. Listen to “Southern Nights”—not Glen Campbell’s hokey hit, but Toussaint’s, the way it dances across the bayou in the moonlight and plays hide-and-seek in the Spanish moss.
As the sun rose over what Hollywood Beach calls its Broadwalk, the morning filled with coffee drinkers, joggers, and bicyclists. In my earbuds, Toussaint’s piano glistened like the Atlantic and I remembered the way he smiled when I asked if he’d ever considered expanding his reach beyond music into the food or style of his Louisiana.
“Never, never,” he said. “I’d rather go hang with Jimmy Buffett.”