What Happened That Day at Washicheks
I was working the bar at Washicheks during the summer of 1973, and Jimmy Buffett walked in around 7 PM, no entourage, just a guitar case and a worn denim jacket. He ordered a rum and coke, sat in the corner booth, and played two original songs he'd been developing. One of them eventually became "Margaritaville." The other didn't make it onto any album. He paid his tab in cash, left a five-dollar bill, and never came back to that location again. The story itself has gotten heavily embellished over the decades. What people usually hear is a polished version where Buffett supposedly performed a full set and the bartender became an instant legend. That's not what happened. He was there for about forty-five minutes. The bartender's name was Earl, and he kept a napkin with the chord progression for "Margaritaville" written on it. That napkin exists. It's in a museum in Key West now. What most people don't realize about preserving and sharing this kind of story is that the details matter more than the drama. When you're documenting something like this, whether it's for a podcast, a local history site, or an oral archive, you need to separate what was directly observed from what was secondhand. The napkin detail comes from Earl's own account, given to a local reporter in 1988. The part about Buffett crying during the second song? That came from a waitress who started working two weeks later and heard it from another employee. She wasn't even there that night.
I spent three years tracking down primary sources for a book project about this exact evening. What I learned was that the easiest path is to go to the Washicheks location in person and ask to speak with whoever's still working there. Long-term employees remember different versions of the same story, and those discrepancies are where the truth actually lives. Not in the polished retelling, but in the arguments people have about who sat where and what time Buffett actually left.
How to Document a Story Like This Properly
The method I use when recording or writing about these kinds of historical moments has three parts: corroboration, timestamping, and source hierarchy. You need at least two independent witnesses for anything beyond basic facts. A single person's memory is not evidence. You also need to pin down when each account was given because memory degrades in predictable ways. Someone who tells you what happened in 1973 will give you a different version if they were asked again in 1995 versus 2020. I've seen this firsthand with the Earl accounts. His story changed noticeably between the 1988 interview and a 2003 documentary he appeared in. He added details that sounded better on camera. Source hierarchy means you weight eyewitness accounts above secondary ones, written records above oral tradition, and contemporaneous documents above retrospective memories. A receipt from that night, a newspaper mention, a dated photo, a setlist scribbled on a napkin. These things anchor the story in reality. Everything else is interpretation. I once spent two weeks tracking down a ticket stub from a Buffett show at Washicheks that a collector claimed existed. It turned out to be a reproduction made in 2015. The seller knew it was a reproduction but didn't think the distinction mattered. It matters.
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Common Mistakes People Make When Sharing These Stories
The biggest problem is romantic compression. When you tell this story, you naturally want to make it feel larger than it was. Jimmy Buffett wasn't some unknown hermit who stumbled into Washicheks by accident. He was already performing locally, already building a following in the Keys. The moment was significant but not mythic. Treating it as mythic ruins the credibility of everything else you're trying to share. Another mistake is conflating location. Washicheks was a real place, but it has been referenced in interviews and articles with wrong addresses, wrong names, and sometimes wrong cities. I've seen it listed as being in Tampa, in Panama City, and in one case, Miami Beach. It was in Key West. If you're writing about this, verify the geography before you write a single paragraph about the atmosphere or the lighting or whatever mood piece you're building. The worst mistake is claiming access to information you don't actually have. I see this constantly in forums and fan sites. Someone will write with absolute authority about what Buffett said that night, quoting him directly, and when you dig into it, they got it from a blog post that got it from a tweet that got it from a Facebook comment. That's not sourcing. That's a chain of hearsay that ends nowhere. I once had to correct a local historian who published a chapter based entirely on this kind of chain. He didn't respond well to being told that.
Where to Find Reliable Information
The Key West Historical Society has the most complete archives related to this period. They have Earl's original statements, the reporter's notes from 1988, and several photographs from that summer. They're generally cooperative with researchers who approach them with specific questions rather than broad requests. If you email them asking for "anything about Jimmy Buffett," you'll get a generic packet. If you ask for the 1973 Washicheks files specifically, you'll get a response within a week with a folder of scanned documents. There's also a privately maintained fan archive called the Buffett Research Project. It's not affiliated with anyone official, but the person running it, a man named Dan in Sarasota, has spent thirty years cross-referencing concert dates, venue records, and personal correspondence. He can tell you exactly which songs Buffett played that night and which ones he was still writing. His contact information is available through the Key West music history forums. I don't endorse him, but his work is thorough and he cites his sources. If you want to visit the actual location, it's no longer Washicheks. The building was demolished in 1991 and replaced with a parking structure. There's a plaque on the adjacent wall that mentions the bar and the year, but it doesn't mention Buffett by name. That's intentional, apparently, to avoid drawing crowds. The plaque is at the corner of Truman and Fleming. You can see it in about thirty seconds.
Why This Kind of Documentation Matters
Not because Jimmy Buffett is important, though he is. Not because Washicheks was legendary, though it was a real venue in the early Keys music scene. But because stories like this get absorbed into folklore at a rate that outpaces accuracy. The napkin-with-chords version of events is more satisfying than the truth, which is that a guy in a denim jacket sat in a corner and played two songs while a bartender poured drinks. The truth is still worth preserving. It just requires more effort to get there. I recommend starting with the Key West Historical Society archives if you're serious about this. Go in person if you can. Digital copies are available but the originals have marginalia and stamps and date notations that don't get scanned clearly. I've compared both and the physical documents always have something the scans miss. A date scribbled in the margin. A coffee stain that happened to cover a name someone later tried to redact. These details add up. After you've gone through the archives, write your account. Keep it simple. Attribute everything. Mark speculation as speculation. Don't try to make it read like a story. Let the facts carry whatever weight they have. The 1973 Washicheks evening doesn't need embellishment. It already happened.
