Tales from Margaritaville

While I found “Where is Joe Merchant” to be trying too hard, the earlier “Tales from Margaritaville” is one of my favorite books by doing just the opposite: The stories here — often little more than vignettes — pour out as easily as Jimmy’s songs, which isn’t surprising, since many of them are expanded versions of songs off his album “Off to see the Lizard.”

Taken together, we get an extremely good vision of the Gulf Coast and the lives of the characters in Jimmy’s musical world, where a big heart is worth more than a fancy car or the nicest clothes, and where good music and good food and good company are more important than who one is in the community or how successful they are.

The book only falters when it leaves the more realistic settings behind for the more fantastic, something that threatens to swamp the novel he wrote as a follow-up to this work, “Where is Joe Merchant.”

No, this isn’t brain surgery, and Jimmy didn’t win the Pulitzer for fiction for this work, but it’s more-than-pleasant summer reading and a worthy companion to his music.

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