The music is there. The credit, as often as not, went elsewhere.
Mason wrote Traffic classics including Feelin' Alright? and Hole In My Shoe, yet was repeatedly ousted from the band he co-founded. His restless career spanned collaborations with Hendrix, Harrison, Clapton, McCartney and the Stones, yet twice ended in bankruptcy.
- Hole in My Shoe reached number two in the UK charts in 1967
- Mason quit Derek and the Dominos before they recorded Layla
- He was declared bankrupt twice despite collaborating with Hendrix, Harrison, McCartney, and the Stones
- His son True predeceased him in 2006; he is survived by wife Winifred Wilson and daughter Danielle
- Heart valve surgery ended his career after his final album, A Shade of Blues, in 2023
Dave Mason, guitarist and songwriter for Traffic who wrote Feelin' Alright? and played with Hendrix, Clapton and the Rolling Stones, has died aged 79.
Dave Mason died at 79 having spent more than half a century orbiting the center of rock history without ever quite landing there himself. He co-founded Traffic, wrote some of the most covered songs of the 1960s, played on records by Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, and Paul McCartney, and still managed to go bankrupt twice. He called himself the Forrest Gump of rock, and the joke landed because it was true.
Mason was born in 1946 in Worcester, the younger of two sons of Nora and Edward Mason. His father ran a sweet shop and spent most of his time at the racetrack; his mother minded the store. Mason grew up shy and overweight, prone to migraines, but he remembered his childhood warmly — building rafts, climbing trees, roaming fields. In his early teens he discovered Buddy Holly and the Shadows, badgered his parents into buying him a guitar, and taught himself by playing along to the radio. His first band, the Jaguars, pressed a private 45 rpm single, funded by those same indulgent parents.
A friendship with drummer Jim Capaldi led to a group called the Hellions in 1964. They played Hamburg's Star Club, backed Adam Faith and Dave Berry, and released a handful of singles before dissolving without a chart entry. Mason landed on his feet as a roadie for the Spencer Davis Group, where he encountered a sixteen-year-old Steve Winwood singing with the kind of authority that stopped people cold. Three years later, in 1967, Winwood formed Traffic with Mason, Capaldi, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Wood. The four of them retreated to a stone cottage in rural Berkshire — no running water, no electricity at first — and spent six months writing and playing. It was the first band to establish what would become the hippie ritual of getting it together in the country, and out of those months came some of the decade's most enduring music.
Mason's contributions were immediate and substantial. He wrote Hole in My Shoe, which climbed to number two in the UK charts, playing both sitar and lead guitar on the track. He wrote Feelin' Alright?, which became a rock standard after Joe Cocker turned it into an anthem — though Diana Ross, Isaac Hayes, the Jackson Five, and Paul Weller also recorded versions. The song was about unrequited love, but its opening line, about needing a change of scene, read like a dispatch from Mason's own life.
He left Traffic at least three times. His habit of disappearing was so pronounced that his face was removed from the American cover of the band's debut album, Mr Fantasy. When Winwood finally closed the door for good, he was blunt about it: he didn't like the way Mason wrote, sang, or played, and the band didn't want him. Mason recalled the verdict in his 2024 memoir, still stung by it. Winwood later acknowledged the real friction differently — Mason, he said, would direct everyone as though they were his backing musicians.
Outside Traffic, Mason's fingerprints are on some of the era's most celebrated recordings. He played the wailing Indian shehnai on the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man. He played the acoustic guitar introduction to Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower. He appeared on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, and Harrison credited him with teaching him slide guitar. He joined Derek and the Dominos in time to play their first concert and appear on their debut single, Tell the Truth — then quit before the band recorded Layla. His solo debut, Alone Together, arrived in 1970 and contained some of his strongest writing, but rather than build on it he pivoted to a country-rock duo with Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. Later he replaced Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac long enough to record the 1995 album Time. Mick Fleetwood, who had known him since the sixties, said Mason had always found a way to prevail while keeping his integrity.
Legal disputes with record labels and two separate bankruptcies kept his solo career as turbulent as his band history. He moved to California in 1969 and stayed. In 2004 he co-founded RKS Guitars, building electric instruments from sustainable materials in a modular design that won an industry award and attracted players including Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. His final album, A Shade of Blues, came out in 2023. Heart valve surgery ended his performing life shortly after.
Mason is survived by his third wife, Winifred Wilson, and a daughter, Danielle. A son, True, died in 2006. Chris Wood died in 1983. Winwood and Capaldi reunited as Traffic in the 1990s without Mason, and a dispute at the band's 2003 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction left another scar. Mason never stopped insisting that Traffic had been the ultimate band. He just never managed to stay in it. What he left behind — the songs, the sessions, the cameos on records that defined an era — amounts to a career that resists any tidy accounting. The music is there. The credit, as often as not, went elsewhere.
Notable Quotes
I'm kind of the Forrest Gump of rock.— Dave Mason, USA Today, 2024
I don't like the way you write, the way you sing, the way you play — and we don't want you in the band.— Steve Winwood to Dave Mason, as recalled in Mason's 2024 memoir
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
He wrote Feelin' Alright? and Hole in My Shoe, played on Layla, All Along the Watchtower, Street Fighting Man — why isn't he a household name?
Because he kept leaving. Every time a door opened onto something permanent, he walked back out. The story of his career is a series of almost-arrivals.
Was that restlessness a flaw, or was it just who he was?
Probably both. He said he never wanted to be a rock star — just wanted to write good music, make money, and have fun. That's not the psychology of someone who builds a legacy. It's the psychology of someone who follows the next interesting thing.
Winwood's dismissal was pretty brutal. Did Mason ever make peace with it?
Not entirely. He was still calling Traffic the ultimate band half a century later, which tells you something. The wound stayed open even as he kept moving.
The bankruptcies are striking given how many landmark records he touched.
That's the structural tragedy of being a session-adjacent figure. You play the intro to one of the most famous guitar recordings in history and the royalties flow to someone else. He was present at the creation, repeatedly, without owning much of what was created.
The Forrest Gump line — was that self-deprecating or was there pride in it?
I think it was both, and he knew it. Gump keeps showing up at the defining moments without quite understanding why. Mason understood exactly why — he was good enough to be invited — but the comparison still stings if you sit with it.
What does the RKS Guitars chapter say about him?
That he never stopped making things. Even after the music industry had chewed him up twice, he found a new way to stay connected to the craft. Keith Richards playing one of your guitars is not nothing.
What should people actually listen to first?
Alone Together, his 1970 solo album. It's where you hear what he could do when no one was pushing him out the door.