Dave Mason, the English singer and guitarist who co-founded the seminal band Traffic before starting a successful solo career, died April 19, 2026. He was 79.
For many rock fans, Traffic was one of the most charming bands to emerge from England in the ’60s. The unique sound—a classical-jazz-folk-blues-psychedelic-rock fusion—was in step with the adventurous spirit of the era. Steve Winwood was the nominal figurehead—having already achieved fame as the teen prodigy behind the Spencer Davis Group’s international hit “Gimme Some Lovin’.” But the other founding members of Traffic—Dave Mason along with Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood—were equally creative musicians.
Mason, only 18 years old, penned “Paper Sun” (famous for his stinging sitar riff) and “You Can All Join In,” and his clever “Hole in My Shoe”—the first song he ever wrote—reached #2 and sold more than a million copies in the UK. “Part and parcel of the whole package was writing, just like learning to sing and play,” Mason explained prior to a series of concerts in Colorado in 1998. “It seemed like it was time to start being original—we weren’t a local band doing covers anymore.”
But internal strife plagued Traffic, with Mason quitting more than once over creative differences. “I left the first time because I was very young—I wasn’t ready for the success and I couldn’t handle it,” Mason said. “We got back together for a second album—they didn’t have enough songs, and I had five. One of them was ‘Feelin’ Alright.’” The song became an anthem, recorded by hundreds of different artists.
“But it turned out that Steve didn’t care for my stuff, so it fell apart. I certainly had an eye on writing some material that was going to be successful. I wasn’t looking to spend a career sitting at home selling my records to a very exclusive, elite number of people. If pop means popular, then yeah.”
By that time, Mason had gained a reputation as an innovative instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. He appeared on acclaimed recordings including George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” (adding the shehnai, an Indian woodwind instrument) and Jimi Hendrix’s classic version of “All Along the Watchtower” (playing a 12-string acoustic guitar). “It was possible to do that because of the social scene in London,” he said. “You could go to private clubs at night, not like dance clubs. Lennon would be in there, and Jagger or Eric Burdon. People were meeting each other in those situations.”
Mason headed for the US to pursue a solo career and recorded 1970’s Alone Together, critically hailed as one of the great rock recordings of the time. It contained a mainstay of the classic-rock canon, “Only You Know and I Know” (a hit when it was covered by Delaney & Bonnie in 1971). Alone Together earned notoriety among collectors for a multicolored vinyl limited edition, which predated the flood of colored discs.
“The idea was that the record was supposed to look like a sunburst,” Mason recalled. “But there was a problem—there was just no way to control the colors of the vinyl on the press, so every one of them came out looking different. Some looked like a bowling ball, some looked like vomit. Some 250,000 of them were pressed. It was in Rolling Stone’s Top 100 classic albums, and it was $300-$500 for a copy of Alone Together. But it seems to have disappeared except for the people who know it.”
In the ’70s, Mason scored a platinum album—Let It Flow, which included the hit “We Just Disagree”—and three gold albums. But he never put everything together in the right way at the right time, and his career was marked by unfavorable recording deals and his battle with addiction. He toured extensively before taking a sabbatical.
In 1994, he was invited to record and tour with Fleetwood Mac, so he couldn’t participate when Winwood and Capaldi reformed Traffic (Wood died of liver failure in 1983). Mason and Capaldi worked together, but Mason’s efforts over the years to reunite the original band were unsuccessful. In 2004, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him as a member of Traffic. At the close of the ceremony, he led an all-star jam on “Feelin’ Alright,” sharing the stage with Winwood and Capaldi for the first time in more than 30 years—and for the last time, ever.
