MOBILE, AL. — Balladeer Jimmy Buffett, who died Sept. 1 at age 76, grew up in this coastal Alabama town and then made his first living as a musician in my home city of New Orleans, where he became friends with early New Orleans Saints football players and where he decided he “will play for gumbo.”

Although he lived largely (in both senses of the word) in Florida, Buffett remained a central Gulf Coast native at heart, a legend who frequently returned to haunts throughout the region from Louisiana bayou country through the Mississippi and Alabama coasts to Pensacola, Florida.