Just a girl who loves Jimmy Buffett and wants to share his music, stories and lifestyle with the world!
Havana is a city that shows up more than once in Jimmy’s songs. It seems like it’s either a place people are trying to leave or a place that people are trying to get to. Havana is the capital and largest city by population in Cuba, and the second largest populated city in the Caribbean. Known as La Habana in Spanish, it’s a city that’s history and architecture stir up dreams of the past and the tropics.
The inspiration for this song, as mentioned by Jimmy in his Directed By Delaney interview, was a writer named Kenneth Patchen, an American novelist and poet. He died in 1972, and it seems like Jimmy was inspired by his being a relatively unknown author who died fairly young. In fact, Patchen was sixty years old at his death and had published several books on poetry and a few novels, but he was a man who also had experimented with Jazz music as well as photography and painting. A real Renaissance type of man, and what I have found out about him could go on for days.
When Jimmy and crew wrote this song, I doubt they had eclipses on their mind, but it was on my mind when I first posted, because it was on the day of a solar eclipse. Since my original post, we experienced the continuation of the cycle and the lunar eclipse and now we have moved right out of eclipse season. But the sun is with us every day, sometimes bright and hot, sometimes muted and it feels like no heat comes from it at all, and about a million variations in between. No matter how it shines, it’s still a gift in the sky and the thing our whole little solar system rotates around, giving life to us, inspiring us.
Something I failed to mention in my initial post was to discuss what a barometer is. A barometer is a device used to measure atmospheric pressure and is helpful when determining weather forecasts. My grandparents had a barometer hanging on the wall of their farmhouse, and it might still be there, alongside an old mercury thermometer, still determining conditions. And I grew up on a farm, listening to more weather reports than a human could possibly ever need to know, so the idea of a barometer or barometric pressure feels like my old friend. I have yet to put one in a pot of soup, though…
Guitars come in all shapes and sizes, and string combinations as well, but the most common would be a six-string guitar, which Jimmy was referencing in this song. Six strings, tuned to E, A, D, G, B, and E, again, elevating an octave by the top string. It seems simple, but as a human who cannot play the guitar, but has toyed with it, I know it’s not that simple at all.
This song was a result of a summer or two or three that Jimmy spent in Montana in the early seventies. It is a song that has certainly made its mark on Ringling, Montana, and it has made its mark on me as well. I can’t say what kind of mark it has made on Jimmy Buffett or his career, but according to setlist.fm, he has played this song 50 times in live shows, which isn’t to shabby, considering that is more song plays than the current population of Ringling.
False Echoes led me to think about stories and memories, and both are funny things. If told a story, we can all hear different parts of it more clearly than others, or not at all. Time and memory and attention can alter these details, until the story changes and changes some more. I want to take a small look into the song lyrics and a couple ships that might tie to this song.
Jimmy has written more than one song influenced by the island of St. Barts in the Caribbean, but Chanson Pour Les Petits Enfants was his first, and no doubt most tender. What was it about this island that captivated him so?
I love that this song talks about curiosity, but also hints about the never-ending questions we all have in life, child or adult. “Teach your children to go fishing with their minds” is something I touched on in my original post, but I want to investigate the concept more. Jimmy himself strikes me as a person who was incredibly curious, and I imagine he was a child full of questions. And maybe there were never enough answers for him? And in that way, I think he went searching for his own answers, and he found them in his songs, his experiences, his travels, and his friendships.
I am not certain if Jimmy or Delaney had any idea the impact that these video interviews would have on Jimmy’s fans, but they certainly did. I for one loved watching them all before, but after Jimmy’s passing, they have a whole deeper meaning for me, and I am so grateful to this father and daughter team for providing us with such a special and personal series.