By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

Jimmy Buffett (news) a country singer? The sea-loving entertainer may hardly be a Drifting Cowboy, but he's all over country radio and CMT these days, singing Hank Williams' Hey Good Lookin' with some of the biggest acts in country music. The weird thing is, he sounds right at home. Which he sort of is.

"Let's just say it had not gone unnoticed in my sphere that I was getting lots of references and similarity to style, song structure and other things in the country world," says Buffett, whose License to Chill album, due next week, boasts a who's who of Nashville names. "Since I did have a little bit of history in that town and had been in and out of there over many years, I kind of took it as a compliment.

"I thought, 'If everybody's kind of that into what we're doing, and it's being that influential, well, I'm still around,' " Buffett says.

Hey Good Lookin', the first single from License to Chill, features Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, Toby Keith and George Strait. All five singers join Buffett for duets on other tracks, as do Martina McBride and Nanci Griffith and Bill Withers. For the recording sessions, Buffett fleshed out his Coral Reefer Band with such less-familiar Nashville names as singer Bekka Bramlett (news) and Will Kimbrough, who plays guitar and contributed a song to the album.

Buffett says he had planned to record License to Chill even before Jackson approached him to sing last year's No. 1 It's Five O'Clock Somewhere. When Buffett came to Nashville in November to perform the song on an awards show, the pieces began to fall together.

"Toby had cut most of his Shock'n Y'all album in my little studio; I had met him there," Buffett says. "I knew Kenny was a big fan, and Clint and I go way back. Then I met Martina there, who wanted to introduce me to her parents, who were big fans. So I asked everybody if they wanted to come down to Key West to recording camp. They all agreed to do it."

Buffett, 57, has a long history in Nashville. The Pascagoula, Miss., native initially moved there in the late '60s, when he didn't have enough money to make it all the way to Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi. He signed with iBarnaby Records and recorded his first album, Down to Earth, which had "grand-total record sales of just over 300 copies," Buffett says. After that experience, he took a job in music trade publication Billboard's Nashville office.

Three decades on, Buffett's career is in fine shape. His loyal following of "Parrothead" fans have made him one of popular music's most reliable concert draws. Buffett will play two nights at Boston's Fenway Park in September. A packed Texas Stadium concert with Jackson and Strait in May could lead to more stadium dates next year.

He has a new novel, A Salty Piece of Land, set for release in the fall; it will include a CD with a song recorded at the same time as License to Chill. There's also the Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville and Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant chains, as well as Buffett-branded margarita mix, tequila and frozen shrimp.

The arrival of a crop of country superstars who brought his influence to their sound primed Buffett's return to the airwaves.

"Almost every male vocalist in the format has some kind of island song," says Gregg Swedberg, program director for KEEY-FM in Minneapolis. "It's the influence that Buffett has had on guys like (Chesney) and Alan. When a major act like Alan Jackson says these island songs are cool, it wakes the rest of our audience up and they go, 'Yeah, that is kind of cool.' "

Black says: "I never really thought about it at the time, but as I would look back later, Jimmy was plenty country. He sang songs about bull riding and Livingston Saturday Night. He's such a great lyricist, and that's the cornerstone of country: the lyric."

Buffett says: "More than anything else, it was these young artists who were either influenced by or liked what I did and let people know that. Because they happen to be at the top of the heap right now, it brought some attention to what I was doing. Sure, I'll take the ride."

That still leaves the Parrotheads with this head-scratcher: Now that he has had more singles reach the country top 40 than on the pop side, should Buffett be considered a country singer? Buffett poses the question himself on Simply Complicated, a song he wrote with '70s R&B singer Bill Withers:

Now I'm having a big problem with my present-day career.
My ship, she has a rudder, but I don't know where to steer.
Am I country, pop or rock 'n' roll? I know they are related.
So I'll just let you be the judge. It's simply complicated.

"Again, people can't figure me out," Buffett says. "But I'm still here. At least I'm on the radio while they're trying to figure me out."