“Jimmy, go run and get me another beer!”
It’s a warm summer Saturday in the Gulf of Mexico and I am swimming next to an unlikely associate: a potbellied middle-aged car salesman named Billy Wayne. We are the two people furthest out in the ocean, both of us neck deep, his head dipping in and out of the water like a Whac-a-mole.
“Bring this nice young lady a cold Bud too,” he shouts over the waves to his son, who has already started back to the beach cooler as if on a mission from God. (“He’s eight now,” Billy assures me. “He can grab his old man a beer or two.”) I wave him off, taking a slug of my Raz-Ber-Rita tall boy.
“You know, this is the best place on earth, The Flora-Bama Lounge. We think about it all year up in Johnson City—been coming since they were babies. Hell, I’ve been coming since I was a boy,” Billy Wayne says in the slurry, syrupy accent of a Tennessean who’s a little tipsy. Jimmy splashes through the waves and paddles out to meet us, presenting the beer with a triumphant grin.
Billy pops the top and turns to face the beach with all the flourish of a king looking out onto his kingdom. “This right here, this is tradition. This is our tradition.” He gives his son a wet splash on the back. “There ain’t nothing more important than that.”
The Flora-Bama Lounge and Package Store—known to friends as the “Flo-Bam”—is the unlikely anchor of generations of family memories. Located almost squarely on the Alabama-Florida state line, the bar has become affectionately known as the gateway to the Redneck Riviera: a stretch of beachfront from Pensacola to Panama City, Florida that’s synonymous with airbrushed t-shirts, regrettable tattoos and weather-beaten beer shacks. It’s been immortalized in song by artists like Jimmy Buffet to Tom T. Hall, visited by celebrities from Kid Rock to Mick Jagger, and has had more yarns spun about it than just about any bar along the Gulf Coast. While the sand-crusted floors are the stage for plenty of lore and legend, Flora-bama’s true legacy is one of a resilient, damned-and-determined commitment to tradition.
The Flora-Bama is an unapologetic product of the 1960s, with a saloon vibe and a trumpeted reputation as the “Last Great American Roadhouse” that is particularly loud this year as the seaside empire celebrates its 50th anniversary. Originally constructed in the spring of 1964, the lounge burned to the ground the day before it was slated to open. Its founders—the Tampary family of Pensacola—scrambled to rebuild, hoping to plant their boozy flag on a beach front location that had been made accessible to the mainland only two years prior. Their resolve saw the lounge rebuilt in a few short months, and in the fall of 1964 the Flora-Bama officially opened as the only liquor-serving establishment for miles around.
Over the past half a century, the lounge has vacillated between monumental success and devastating setbacks. In 1979, the Flora-Bama’s original humble shack saw the first of many expansions to include a pool hall and live music, which helped shift the bar’s demographic away from thirsty construction workers and leather-clad bikers towards vacationers from across the Southeast. The following decades have seen the addition of a Flora-Bama marina, package store, and “yacht club” complete with a place to tie up your boat a stone’s throw from an outdoor bar.
Curiously, there are also babies—lots of babies—and toddlers milling about like they own the place. After concluding a Stevie Ray Vaughan tune, the main stage band invites all the children to the floor to dance along to the Barney theme song. Above their heads, dozens of bras suspended on crisscrossing wires sway in the misty sea breeze. “Start ‘em young, babe,” a bartender says to me as a little redheaded girl helps her mother carry drinks to a nearby picnic table. A day at the Flora-Bama certainly is a family affair.
With each setback endured—including nearly being destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and the financially devastating effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill a few years later—the lounge has somehow emerged stronger than ever. Today, the Flora-Bama is nothing short of a sprawling, teetering, salt water-battered empire.
The main building’s all-wood establishment is fittingly dingy and rickety, with the architectural styling and structural integrity of a 10-year-old boy’s fantasy treehouse. It’s covered in a fine paste of wet sand and spilled booze, creating the sticky floor phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ever danced on a table in a frat house. On approach, visitors are presented with a number of “Choose Your Own Adventure” style staircases, each pointing to a different bar option. I choose the one that will get me to the Bushwacker—the bar’s signature drink—fastest.
The Bushwacker contains a secret ingredient mix of coffee-flavored liqueurs, rum and ice cream blended into to a saccharine, Daiquiri-style beverage that goes down easy, and assuredly causes a hangover. Each bar is rigged up with an impressive liquor jet system, which allows bartenders to spray Jack Daniels and Tito’s vodka into plastic cups with the finesse of boozy soda jerks. For all its rustic appeal, the bar’s machinery is highly advanced. After marveling at the bartender’s ability to simultaneously pull levers for the creamy drinks and shoot high-pressure liquor with alarming accuracy, I begin to wander around the maze-like, storied bar, Bushwacker in hand.
The lounge has been built out so that it’s impossible to go more than 100 feet without hitting a new bar, each with a slightly different look and feel. There’s the downstairs outside bar that’s practically on the sand and home to the Sunday morning “Worship by the Water” church service. There’s the upper deck bar where oysters are plentiful, and recently graduated Alabama frat boys take their Lily Pulitzer-clad girlfriends for low-key beachfront dining. One bar in a quiet nook reveals a barefoot elderly man with a yin-yang earring playing a heartfelt acoustic version of “House at Pooh Corner” by Loggins and Messina. There are no doors between indoor and outdoor at the Flora-Bama—only long, fringed pieces of plastic grimy with years of wear and tear.
The interior walls of the Flora-Bama are covered with enough paraphernalia and flair that it would make an Applebee’s blush. Vanity license plates, yellowed newspaper articles, wild animal heads, bras, cow skulls, and Southern sports memorabilia are plastered over almost every inch of wall space, tacked up haphazardly with nail guns and staplers. The building is also covered in signatures and messages in the spirit of bathroom wall graffiti. Some signees keep it simple—“Kandy wuz here 2010!”—while others try to offer words of wisdom—“Don’t let the door hit ya where the Lord split ya!”—or simply doodle a picture of their big rig. The bar is stubbornly committed to remaining a time capsule across the generations—perfect for annual pilgrimages and fuzzy memories.
Curiously, there are also babies—lots of babies—and toddlers milling about like they own the place. After concluding a Stevie Ray Vaughan tune, the main stage band invites all the children to the floor to dance along to the Barney theme song. Above their heads, dozens of bras suspended on crisscrossing wires sway in the misty sea breeze. “Start ‘em young, babe,” a bartender says to me as a little redheaded girl helps her mother carry drinks to a nearby picnic table. A day at the Flora-Bama certainly is a family affair.
Later on in the evening, I see Billy Wayne and Jimmy again, Sharpies in hand.
“We’re adding this year!” Jimmy says, pointing to a weathered spot on the wall featuring their names and more than a dozen years listed out as a reminder of their yearly trip.
I smile and sign my name nearby, ready to start an annual tradition of my own.