Column: Remembering Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Volcano’

“(Volcano) is the most popular song I’ve ever had anything to do with,” says Keith Sykes. “I wish I had a dozen more like that.”

The name Keith Sykes seeped into my Parrot Head psyche in 1978—well before there was even a thing called Parrot Heads. I was 13, the age when Jimmy Buffett first blipped on my musical radar, just after I first heard the tastiest food-related song ever written, “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

I first heard the cheeseburger song on the school bus AM radio, which miraculously found a spot amongst a slew of Bee Gees songs: I like mine with lettuce and tomatoes, Heinz 57, and French fried potatoes, big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer . . .

It was the catchiest meat patty song since Burger King captivated us with a cheery “Have It Your Way” commercial jingle: Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us . . .

“WHAT. IS. THIS?” I wondered aloud as the creaking, bouncing bus transported me homeward-bound.

The afternoon DJ mentioned the artist’s name afterwards: Jimmy Buffett. To hear Buffett for the first time marked a formative moment that has been sustained into my 60s.

The next day, a Saturday, I convinced Dad to drive me to the local bait-shop-record-store on Main Street. It was close to his favorite liquor store, so why not. In the small, river-town shop you could buy bloodworms, and, as fate would have it, a newly released Jimmy Buffett record, “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”

“Cheeseburger” was side one’s fifth—and final—song. I replayed it constantly via my bedroom turntable until I had mastered its lyrics, like one might commit to memory a favorite recipe. The song was food to my ears. Countless “huge hunk of meats” later, I became blissfully satiate and flipped to side two, which started with gentle breeze and ocean wave sound effects, soon followed by an ethereal harmonica part by Fingers Taylor. I sat there on the Coast of Marseilles, my thoughts came by like wind through my hands, how good it’d be to feel you again, how good it’d be to feel that way again . . .

Going from a novelty number like “Cheeseburger In Paradise” to a master-class songwriting marvel as Coast of Marseilles demonstrated Buffett’s musical depths. “Coast of Marseilles” ranks among the most beautiful songs about eternal longing ever written. It puts a lump in your throat. How influential was it for me? Well, during my first marriage proposal 10 years later, I made sure it was playing in the background. She said yes. We slow danced on the shag carpet. We lasted 10 years. I still love the song.

I assumed Jimmy had written “Coast of Marseilles.” The song credit in the liner notes educated me otherwise. The songwriter was Keith Sykes.

According the Syke’s website, his 100+ songs have been recorded by artists ranging from Rosanne Cash to Jerry Jeff Walker to George Thorogood to John Prine. An estimated 25 million albums that include his songs have been sold. In 2024, Sykes published his memoir, A Very Short Time, which chronicles his magical mystery ride musical career, referencing Buffett acolytes Mac McAnally, Fingers Taylor, Doyle Grisham, Will Kimbrough, Nadirah Shakoor, Buffett’s little sister, Lulu Buffett, and others.

During a recent phone interview with Memphis-based Sykes, he recalled what it felt like to have Jimmy Buffett record his song.

“I felt great about it,” Sykes told me. “Jimmy had come to Memphis to play at the Ellis Auditorium, which no longer exists. He played and we exchanged albums that night. I had one that was just released and he was promoting his Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes record. He called up and said he was going to do ‘Coast of Marseilles’ on his next album.”

The success of his previous album, which was powered by the signature song “Margaritaville” turned beach bum Buffett into a shrewd marketer, business mogul, and eventual billionaire. Record sales for Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes reached coveted Platinum status. Knowing this, Sykes had no doubt that Buffett’s follow-up would do extremely well. Son of a Son of a Sailor reached Platinum too.

“It was good for me,” Keith said—an understatement. “After he cut Marseilles, he called and asked if I had anything else.” Sykes steered Buffett to “The Last Line,” which is song three on side one, a perfect fit for the record. “They did a real good job of it.”

Buffett sent an early cut of “Coast of Marseilles” to Keith. “It was just a rough mix. And at the end, he included a spoken biography about me. I’ve got that tape around here someplace. I’ve got to dig it out so I can share it. Assuming I’ve got a lot more time behind me than in front of me, I should take those little things out and share them with people,” he said.

Sykess original versions of the two aforementioned songs appear on his own previously recorded albums. His original recordings are great in their own right. Buffett’s “Coast of Marseilles,” backed by big studio money, resulted in a fuller sound, but Buffett’s take on “The Last Line” is mostly similar to Sykes. Both versions of “The Last Line” include female backup singers in the chorus, though Syke’s singers bring more of a gospel soul feel to it.

Keith is used to other artists adding personal touches to his songs. Putting creative ego aside, he welcomes the added flourishes and interpretations. It’s part of a singer-songwriter’s job.

“That’s what you write songs for, so you can share them. When a songwriter as great as Jimmy decides to do your songs, it’s like . . . well . . . there you go. He can write circles around all of us, especially when it comes to story songs. But he expressed to me in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t cut anything that he thought people were trying to be him. He said, ‘I write the best Jimmy Buffett songs.’ That’s what made ‘Coast of Marseilles’ such an important song—for me and for him. It was a real touchstone because he wouldn’t have written that song. So I just thought that was a beautiful way to look at it.”

Before his big Buffett boost, Keith earned his chops on the rough and tumble college coffee house circuit. In six years, he headlined an estimated 450 shows at scores of college campuses. And somehow he stayed sane. Career-wise, he decided to take refugee status from all the student union gigs; to take a break; to refocus his creative energies into a dependable money-making career. “The Last Line” was inspired by this personal sea change. Given my life for the songs that I sing, matter of fact, I’ve given everything, time has come to not make a sound, time has come to lay my burdens down . . . it’s come from behind, now is the time for the last line. This didn’t mean that he had written his final song. It just meant that he wanted to put more focus on club work and venues catering more to adult audiences who actually bought records.

Of Son of a Son of a Sailor’s nine songs, Keith gained notoriety for having written two of them, the rest being attributed solely to Buffett. “I have to say my songwriting life entered a whole new phase from that point forward,” he wrote on his website.

In The Parrot Head Handbook, which accompanied the 1992 four-disc “Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads” retrospective (yes, I still have the handbook; it’s my Bible), Buffett wrote that Coast of Marseilles “is one of the best songs I have ever heard…Keith Sykes wrote this years back when he was hanging around Key West, and it felt as if it had been molded for me. I never get tired of singing this song.” 

Keith’s talent obviously struck the right chord with Buffett. He was soon recruited into Buffett’s infamous Coral Reefer Band. His first assignment was serving as guitarist and backing vocalist on Buffett’s subsequent album, Volcano, followed by a tour promoting it. Volcano, achieving gold status, further built on the steadily evolving Buffett brand that eventually launched Jimmy into the musical stratosphere. One could reasonably argue that the Volcano album, song for song, represented one of Buffett’s three most solid collections at that time. It’s still a legitimate claim 47 years later.

Again, the school bus radio alerted me to his latest album release, via the song, “Fins.” Back to the bait-shop-record-store we went. I learned important things on the school bus, more so than actual school. I wonder how different I would be as a person if not for the bus rides. I don’t even want to go there.

“When he called and asked me to be in the band, it just was mind blowing. That’s the last phone call I expected to get that morning because I was with Kris Kristofferson at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City,” Keith recalled.

To have Buffett include two Sykes songs for one album was marked a well-deserved career milestone for him, but to then be recruited as an official Coral Reefer, well, that was a whole other thing. After returning to Memphis, Keith soon packed his bags and headed to the lower latitudes to record Volcano in the British West Indies. Montserrat was about as exotic as an island could be.

“Well, you know, that was Jimmy’s doings putting it together,” Sykes said. “He had heard about (Beatles producer) George Martin building his recording studio down in Montserrat and wanted to cut there because it was just a perfect match for what he was doing. We were the second act to ever record there. The first was Climax Blues Band.”

The Police, Dire Straits, Elton John, Paul McCartney and other future Rock and Roll Hall of Famers would eventually record there. Forty-seven years later, Keith still gushes over meeting the legendary Martin, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1996 and inducted into the hall of fame in 1999.

“I thought to myself, ‘GEORGE MARTIN was talking to me! It was another amazing thing that happened to me because I knew Jimmy Buffett,” Sykes wrote in his memoir.

Two of Volcano’s key songs were “Fins” and the title track, the latter for which Sykes cowrote with Buffett in Monserrat, almost as an afterthought. Both songs became part of eight songs that Buffett and Parrot Heads affectionately refer to as “The Big 8.” There probably hasn’t been a Buffett concert since 1979 that didn’t include “Fins” and “Volcano” on the setlist.

“Volcano’s” chorus proved just as fun and catchy as the cheeseburger song: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know where I’m a gonna go, when the volcano blow.

“We were there two or three weeks,” said Sykes. “After we got the tracks recorded and everybody was sort of in overdub mode, me and one of the keyboard players (Andy McMahon) went up to this volcano we heard about. I told Jimmy about it, and he said, ‘We’re going tomorrow.’ So we went up there the next day, then came back, wrote that song in about 15 minutes, and cut it that night.”

Sykes had the song’s melody locked in by the time he and Jimmy tag-teamed on its completion. When it came down to start adding lyrics, Buffett looked at Sykes, who simply shrugged and said almost jokingly, “I don’t know.” Jimmy started playing chords. Syke’s “I don’t know” set into the song like instant concrete.

“I tossed out a line, and he tossed out a line. We just traded lines for the whole song,” Sykes said. “It was just one of those magical things that you never hear about today. Today, somebody might consider a song and take six months to figure out if they want to do it or not. And then another bunch of months to get everything together to make the record . . . and on and on and on. Too many lawyers. It just takes forever to do anything. Writing ‘Volcano’ was a magical event all the way around, everything about it.”

The ad-libbing at the end was nothing more than a list of places Buffett didn’t want to land after imagining being shot from an erupting volcano. San Juan Airport was one of the places mentioned. Sykes was unsure how the airport earned its place in the song. For him, his San Juan Airport experiences were favorable. He recalled how his wife, Jerene (the Sykes have been married 50 years), regaled him with a story about pulling out tissue paper in the bathroom stall, only to find 10 100-dollar bills in her hands.

“One-thousand dollars came out of the damn thing, probably some sort of drug deal,” he said, adding with a laugh, “We really like the San Juan Airport.”

He added, “It was a crazy time. It was a wonderful time. There couldn’t have been a more apropos place for Jimmy to cut a record. ‘Volcano’ is the most popular song I’ve ever had anything to do with. You can go anywhere in the world and mention that song and people know it, so that’s a lot of fun. I wish I had a dozen more like that.”

Both troubadours started their careers in the ‘60s. Since 1969, 15 Keith Sykes albums have been released. During a storied musical journey spanning more than 50 years, Sykes has had the good fortune of collaborating with a who’s who of songwriting stalwarts, many of whom he considers creative touchstones, including the troubadour triumvirate that is Buffett, John Prine, and Jerry Jeff Walker. All three died around the same time: Prine and Walker in 2020; Buffett in 2023. Sykes also helped jumpstart Todd Snider’s career. Snider died in 2025.

At 77, Sykes remains excited about making his own music. Like Buffett, he’s often inspired by beach settings. Combined, his salt-and-sand songs, “Come As You Are Beach Bar” and “Little Beach Town” (which even name-drops Buffett) have achieved over a half-million Spotify plays. He is popular with Trop Rock fans.

“I’ve had a natural tie to a certain kind of music anyway, even before I was a Coral Reefer, because of my love of the islands, the little beach towns, and the people I meet when I’m in that environment,” he noted in his online biography.

It still brings a smile to hear his songs on Radio Margaritaville (SiriusXM), which began airing in 1998 and continues celebrating the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle. In essence, the station keeps the party going, just as the Coral Reefer Band continues touring in memory of their leader.

“Keith is one of my favorite people that I’ve met in the time that I have been with Radio Margaritaville,” said JD Spradlin, an on-air personality since 2007.

This Sept. 1 will mark the third anniversary of Buffett’s death due to Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare cancer linked to long-term sun exposure. According to merkelcell.org, “Online searches for ‘Merkel cell carcinoma’ and ‘skin cancer’ saw a huge upward spike and remained very high for around a week after his death . . . This suggests an opportunity to educate more people about this rare skin cancer, especially in areas with increased risk of skin cancer, as they may be more curious and open to this information due to the interest surrounding Buffett’s death.” A possible silver lining can be found in knowing Buffett’s popularity has, as the site suggests, “increased awareness of skin cancer that has the potential to save lives.” 

Sykes was visiting his hometown, Murray, Kentucky, when he heard the tragic news. “I was walking down the steps of this little hotel when I heard about Jimmy dying. I didn’t know he was that sick.”

The last time Sykes saw Buffett in person was in 2021 at a celebration of life for Walker. “Jimmy was just perfectly normal in every way,” Sykes recalled. “Susan (Walker’s widow) told me just a few days before Jimmy died he flew to Austin just to see her and hang out. They had lunch and stuff. She said he was just fine. He handled (the cancer) really well.”

In his memoir, Sykes reflected on the Buffett phenom: “Jimmy was different. In the middle of the heavy rock, disco, and hugely produced ballads there was little ol’ ‘Margaritaville’ kicking major ass with its acoustic guitar and marimba fills. Everyone who liked their music less intense and more story-oriented embraced that record. Soon they would be into the lifestyle that Jimmy embodied. I thought it was awesome and I always will.”

“There’s millions of people, obviously, that wanted to do that. And he was the flagship for that kind of stuff. He made it his own,” he told me. “He’s meant a lot to me for a lot of different reasons over the years. Obviously he was a big part of my musical life.”

A regret Sykes has is that Buffett never got to read what he wrote about him in his memoir. He feels the same regarding Walker and Prine too. In the memoir, he capped his Buffett praises with these heartfelt words: “Here’s to you Jimmy Buffett. As long as my heart’s beating you’ll be in it.”

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For more insight about Sykes and Buffett’s relationship, visit singer-songwriter Otis Gibbs Youtube Channel. For a definitive resource about Sykes’ career, buy his memoir, A Very Short Time. Listen to his albums and singles on Spotify.