Jimmy Buffett Birthplace — Pascagoula

Jimmy Buffett was born on Christmas Day, 1946, in a private house in Pascagoula — no marker, no museum, just a residence where the man who built the Margaritaville empire entered the world. He grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a stretch of Mississippi Sound where the Pascagoula River meets the Gulf, a place that was still a fishing village when he was a child and a shipbuilding industrial center by the time he left. The sound he made — laid-back, salt-air, Gulf-haunted — started here. Pascagoula sits on the eastern edge of the Mississippi coast, a region that spent its first two centuries as a French colonial outpost and frontier, then became a shipyard powerhouse during World War II. The Coast's ethnic diversity and maritime ties to the wider world gave it a different character from the rest of Mississippi, and Buffett carried that out into the wider world himself. He wrote a song called "The Pascagoula Run." In 2015, he came back and played a free concert. He died in September 2023 at age seventy-six. The Margaritaville brand is worth billions. The coast he grew up on is still the coast he sang about — still here, still the same stretch of sound and shore.