How the Beach Vacation Became a Country-Music Trope
“The sun is hot,” Alan Jackson sings, accompanied by a trio of jaunty guitars (electric, acoustic, and pedal steel), and for a moment this sounds like a celebration. Instead, it turns out to be the beginning of a complaint:
The guy in the song has a job that he hates, and has a plan—or, perhaps, a daydream of a plan—to knock off early and grab a drink. In the chorus, he makes up his mind: “It’s only half past twelve, but I don’t care / It’s five o’clock somewhere.” The song, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” was released in 2003, and although it was probably not the song of the summer that year—scholars and stans seem to agree that the title was won by Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who declared themselves “Crazy in Love”—it was certainly the country song of the summer. “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” ruled the Billboard country chart for almost all of August and September, spending a total of eight weeks at No. 1. Like all great summer songs, this one is about the season, yet it might be more accurate to say that it is about summer as a vibe, or a life style; it involves a beach, a breeze, and a potent mixed drink, though perhaps the first two ingredients are optional. A little more than halfway through, Jackson poses what turns out to be a consequential question: “What would Jimmy Buffett do?” And, of course, Buffett himself arrives, accompanied by his longtime percussionist Eric Darken on the marimba and a bar full of cheering friends, to reprise the chorus in a voice that is more talky and less twangy than Jackson’s. The idea is escape, accessible through a chain of associations: listening to a song can make you feel as if you’re having a drink, and having a drink can make you feel as if you are in Margaritaville, the semi-fictional tropical paradise that Buffett turned into a not-at-all-fictional business empire.
With its memorable concept and big-name guest star, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” might have seemed like a one-off novelty track, but actually it reflected a growing trend. In 1999, Kenny Chesney had topped the country chart with “How Forever Feels,” in which a guy remembers a tropical getaway and declares, “Now I know how Jimmy Buffett feels”; the music video, filmed in St. Thomas, helped transform Chesney from an earnest love-song specialist into the genre’s reigning bard of beach vacations. “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” was written by a pair of Nashville songwriters, Jim (Moose) Brown and Don Rollins, and in fact they reportedly pitched it to Chesney, who evidently didn’t need one more beach song. In the summer of 2003, while Jackson and Buffett were at No. 1, Chesney had a No. 2 hit with “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems,” a country shuffle that has just about the same plot: “Wanna soak up life for a while in laid-back mode / No boss, no clock, no stress, no dress code.” Chesney’s song skillfully evokes the meditative feeling of a perfect beach day, but “Five O’Clock” is memorable because of its gleeful defiance: in the verses, the island paradise is less vivid than the tough job and lousy boss that our hero is dying to ditch. By the time Jackson sings, “My Jamaican vacation’s gonna start right here,” it is starting to seem clear that “vacation” is merely a euphemism for day-drinking, which might explain why the details don’t quite add up. Why would somebody who is complaining about the hot July sun also be contemplating a trip to Jamaica? And if it was 12:30 P.M. in Nashville, then it was probably not five o’clock anywhere, since no place on earth is exactly four and a half hours ahead of Central Daylight Time. In fact, during the summer months, Nashville and Jamaica share a time zone, not to mention a reputation as good places for visitors to come and drink their troubles away.
This was not Jackson’s first beach song: his catalogue also included a cover of “Margaritaville,” Buffett’s signature song, as well as “Tropical Depression,” about a newly single guy suffering through a miserable solo vacation. But Jackson, a wry country traditionalist, resisted what must have been a strong temptation to release a sequel to “Five O’Clock.” Plenty of his peers filled the void, none more energetically than Chesney, who has by now built a beachy brand that almost rivals Buffett’s. (Buffett’s fans are known as Parrotheads; Chesney’s are called No Shoes Nation.) Some of the best beach-country songs have treated this imagery as a running joke. In 2004, Blake Shelton released “Some Beach,” in which his Oklahoma accent turns the titular phrase into a homophone for a frustrated interjection. Last year, the cheerfully old-fashioned country singer Zach Top revived this tradition with “Flip--Flop,” in which a brokenhearted man vows to forget both the woman who disappointed him and the place where she did it: “I don’t give a flip-flop / If I ever see that beach again.” Buffett himself, who died in 2023, had grown up in Mississippi and Alabama, and began his career as a country-influenced singer and songwriter in Nashville, in the early nineteen-seventies. In the wake of “Five O’Clock,” he became a kind of country godfather, and he eventually returned to No. 1, in 2010, with “Knee Deep,” a collaboration with the Zac Brown Band that features just enough offbeat strumming to conjure the faint aroma of reggae.
As the genre’s name suggests, country music tends to be preoccupied with place; the charts are full of tributes to the satisfaction of being firmly rooted in a small town, and the sorrows of leaving it behind. In fact, this preoccupation is the secret theme of these sun-and-sand songs. “Knee Deep” begins with a vow to “put the world away for a minute,” which suggests that it will be back soon enough, possibly as soon as the song ends. “Sand in My Boots” a 2021 Morgan Wallen song, adopts the viewpoint of a guy who’s home again: he met a woman on vacation, but couldn’t persuade her to accompany him back to eastern Tennessee, where he lives. Many of the best beach-country songs are wistful this way, depicting summer as an elusive thing: it’s coming one day, or maybe it came and went already, or maybe it will be over soon. In Jackson and Buffett’s cheerful evocation of beachfront life, you can hear an acknowledgment of a less bucolic reality. It’s always five o’clock somewhere, or close enough. But not here, not now, not for you. ♦