High Cumberland Jubilee

Buffett emerged from the Keys with his signature sound and persona.

The two albums that he made in his Nashville era, 1970s' Down to Earth and 1971's High Cumberland Jubilee, feature none of the island breeziness that defines Buffett's work from just a few years later.

"He was more interested in doing his thing, whatever he wanted to call it then," said Travis Turk, a recording engineer who worked with Buffett on the early Nashville albums.

"I don't think we categorized it.

We just cut some music that he liked and we liked.

We put it out there and hoped it would find a genre to play in.

It didn't." "After we found out that High Cumberland Jubilee wasn't coming out, Jimmy and I boarded a train down at Union Station to New York," says Buzz Cason, the producer and background vocalist and songwriter who helped co-write many of Jimmy's early songs.

"We decided that would be a good way to chill out.