Margie Washichek: Jimmy Buffett’s First Wife

Margie Washichek was Jimmy Buffett’s first wife. They married in 1969, at the very start of his professional music career, and their marriage ended in the early 1970s; since then she has lived a private life, and almost nothing about her later life is publicly confirmed.

Margie Washichek and Jimmy Buffett

The commonly reported account places their meeting at Spring Hill College in Mobile, but how they met is not reliably documented. What is better documented is the moment that followed their marriage: as Mobile newlyweds, they moved to Nashville after Buffett signed a songwriting agreement with Russell-Cason Music. A contemporary Mobile Press profile, “A Winning Team,” published on 21 July 1969 and preserved in the Pascagoula Public Library’s Buffett Family File, described Margie as a critical first listener for his new songs: “I’m fairly critical, so Jimmy plays his songs for me first and I tell him what I think of them.” That is the extent of what the profile supports — critical listening and moral support, not co-writing, managing, or financing his work.

That Nashville period came at the very start of Buffett’s professional career. He also did freelance work for Billboard, and his first album, “Down to Earth,” followed in 1970. The marriage, however, was short-lived: the marriage ended in the early 1970s, and sources differ on 1971 or 1972.

Life after the marriage

After the marriage ended, Margie Washichek lived a private life away from the public eye. That is also the direct answer to the question people most often ask about her — what happened to Jimmy Buffett’s first wife — in the only honest form the public record allows: she stepped away from public attention, and almost nothing about her later life, current whereabouts, career, or finances is publicly confirmed. No children with Buffett are publicly recorded, and no net-worth figure for her is publicly confirmed.

For closing context, Buffett later married Jane Slagsvol in 1977, and he died on 1 Sep 2023. Jane’s children — Savannah, Sarah Delaney, and Cameron Marley — are not Margie’s children.