{"id":985,"date":"2026-07-19T11:11:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T11:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=985"},"modified":"2026-07-19T11:11:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T11:11:06","slug":"how-the-beach-vacation-became-a-country-music-trope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=985","title":{"rendered":"How the Beach Vacation Became a Country-Music Trope"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Songs of Summer<\/strong>, a series on music and memory.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThe sun is hot,\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

Read more The Lost Art of the Bromance<\/a><\/p>\n

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The sun is hot and that old clock is moving slow<\/p>\n

And so am I<\/p>\n

Workday passes like molasses in wintertime<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s July.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/div>\n

The guy in the song has a job that he hates, and has a plan\u2014or, perhaps, a daydream of a plan\u2014to knock off early and grab a drink. In the chorus, he makes up his mind: \u201cIt\u2019s only half past twelve, but I don\u2019t care \/ It\u2019s five o\u2019clock somewhere.\u201d The song, \u201cIt\u2019s Five O\u2019Clock Somewhere,\u201d was released in 2003, and although it was probably not the song of the summer that year\u2014scholars and stans seem to agree that the title was won by Beyonc\u00e9 and Jay-Z, who declared themselves \u201cCrazy in Love\u201d\u2014it was certainly the country<\/em> song of the summer. \u201cIt\u2019s Five O\u2019Clock Somewhere\u201d ruled the Billboard<\/em> 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: \u201cWhat would Jimmy Buffett do?\u201d 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\u2019s. The idea is escape, accessible through a chain of associations: listening to a song can make you feel as if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

With its memorable concept and big-name guest star, \u201cIt\u2019s Five O\u2019Clock Somewhere\u201d 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 \u201cHow Forever Feels,\u201d in which a guy remembers a tropical getaway and declares, \u201cNow I know how Jimmy Buffett feels\u201d; the music video, filmed in St. Thomas, helped transform Chesney from an earnest love-song specialist into the genre\u2019s reigning bard of beach vacations. \u201cIt\u2019s Five O\u2019Clock Somewhere\u201d 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\u2019t 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 \u201cNo Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems,\u201d a country shuffle that has just about the same plot: \u201cWanna soak up life for a while in laid-back mode \/ No boss, no clock, no stress, no dress code.\u201d Chesney\u2019s song skillfully evokes the meditative feeling of a perfect beach day, but \u201cFive O\u2019Clock\u201d 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, \u201cMy Jamaican vacation\u2019s gonna start right here,\u201d it is starting to seem clear that \u201cvacation\u201d is merely a euphemism for day-drinking, which might explain why the details don\u2019t 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.<\/em> in Nashville, then it was probably not five o\u2019clock 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Lorenzo Mattotti\u2019s \u201cThe Beautiful Game\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This was not Jackson\u2019s first beach song: his catalogue also included a cover of \u201cMargaritaville,\u201d Buffett\u2019s signature song, as well as \u201cTropical Depression,\u201d 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 \u201cFive O\u2019Clock.\u201d Plenty of his peers filled the void, none more energetically than Chesney, who has by now built a beachy brand that almost rivals Buffett\u2019s. (Buffett\u2019s fans are known as Parrotheads; Chesney\u2019s 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 \u201cSome Beach,\u201d 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 \u201cFlip–Flop,\u201d in which a brokenhearted man vows to forget both the woman who disappointed him and the place where she did it: \u201cI don\u2019t give a flip-flop \/ If I ever see that beach again.\u201d 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 \u201cFive O\u2019Clock,\u201d he became a kind of country godfather, and he eventually returned to No. 1, in 2010, with \u201cKnee Deep,\u201d a collaboration with the Zac Brown Band that features just enough offbeat strumming to conjure the faint aroma of reggae.<\/p>\n

As the genre\u2019s 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. \u201cKnee Deep\u201d begins with a vow to \u201cput the world away for a minute,\u201d which suggests that it will be back soon enough, possibly as soon as the song ends. \u201cSand in My Boots\u201d a 2021 Morgan Wallen song, adopts the viewpoint of a guy who\u2019s home again: he met a woman on vacation, but couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s coming one day, or maybe it came and went already, or maybe it will be over soon. In Jackson and Buffett\u2019s cheerful evocation of beachfront life, you can hear an acknowledgment of a less bucolic reality. It\u2019s always five o\u2019clock somewhere, or close enough. But not here, not now, not for you.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s War on Journalists<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kelefa Sanneh on the song \u201cIt\u2019s Five O\u2019Clock Somewhere,\u201d by Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett, which was a diversion from a genre that extolls the virtue of staying close to your home town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-songs-of-summer"],"yoast_head":"\nHow the Beach Vacation Became a Country-Music Trope - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=985\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How the Beach Vacation Became a Country-Music Trope - 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