Dave Mason, Traffic Co-Founder and Rock’s Forrest Gump, Dead at 79

He once called himself “kind of the Forrest Gump of rock,” and like the character, Dave Mason had an uncanny knack for being in the room when history was being made. He played the chiming 12-string acoustic that opens Jimi Hendrix's “All Along the Watchtower.” He droned away on a shehnai during the Stones' “Street Fighting Man.” He sat in on the All Things Must Pass sessions with George Harrison. He was briefly a Derek and the Domino, briefly a member of Fleetwood Mac, briefly almost a Jimi Hendrix Experience. And before all of that, he co-founded one of the most quietly influential British bands of the late sixties.

On Sunday, April 19, Mason died peacefully at his home in Gardnerville, Nevada, in the Carson Valley he had come to love. He was 79. According to a statement posted to his official Instagram, he had just cooked dinner with his wife Winifred, sat down in his favorite chair for a nap with his Maltese, Star, at his feet, and never woke up. No cause of death was announced, though Mason had retired from the road last fall after canceling his Traffic Jam Tour in 2024 because of what doctors described as a serious heart condition. A storybook ending, his family called it. On his own terms.

It was a quieter exit than the music suggested. Mason was a wanderer by nature, and his career reads like a chronicle of seventies rock told sideways, glimpsed through the windows of someone else's session. Born May 10, 1946, in Worcester, England, he grew up in the Midlands not far from where Robert Plant and John Bonham came of age. A childhood fall from a ceiling loft cost him 18 months in a hospital and the use of one hip, and he had to relearn how to walk. He picked up a guitar at 16, fell in love with Buddy Holly, and was gigging professionally before he was out of his teens.

By 1967 he was in Traffic, the band he started with Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood after the four of them famously holed up in a Berkshire cottage to woodshed a sound. They emerged with three U.K. Top Ten hits in a single year. The biggest of them, “Hole in My Shoe,” was Mason's. So, on the second album, was “Feelin' Alright?”, a loping, rueful little blues that Mason wrote and Joe Cocker proceeded to make immortal. The Jackson 5 cut it. So did John Belushi, Three Dog Night, Lou Rawls, and seemingly everyone else in the next decade. It became one of those songs that no longer belonged to any one artist, just to the era.

Mason's relationship with Traffic was the central drama of his musical life. He left after “Hole in My Shoe” hit, came back to write half of the second record, then got fired in a single brutal sentence from Winwood that he recounted in his 2024 memoir: he didn't like the way Mason wrote, sang, or played, and the band didn't want him anymore. He drifted back briefly for Welcome to the Canteen in 1971, fought with Winwood again at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2003, and according to Mason, Capaldi told Winwood on his deathbed in 2005 not to reform the group.

The solo career that followed was the kind that critics call underappreciated and fans call exactly the right size. Alone Together, his 1970 debut on Blue Thumb, was cut in Tulsa with players borrowed from Delaney and Bonnie's traveling circus, and it stands as one of the unsung pleasures of the post-Beatles rock canon. “Only You Know and I Know” became a small classic. Seven years later, his guitarist Jim Krueger handed him “We Just Disagree,” a soft rock ballad of weary, civilized heartbreak that became Mason's biggest American hit and a staple of every classic rock station that has ever existed.

He had three gold albums, a strange duet record with Cass Elliot, a guest spot on Paul McCartney's “Listen to What the Man Says,” a duet with a young Michael Jackson on “Save Me,” and a lifetime of friendships and feuds spread across half a dozen scenes. He kept recording into his seventies, releasing a re-cut Alone Together in 2020 and a new album, A Shade of Blue, in 2025.

“I'm not a rock star, let's put it that way,” he told Rock Cellar in 2020. “I never wanted to be. I just wanted to write great music, make some money and have fun.”

Mission accomplished, Dave. Feelin' alright.