It’s a loss that music lovers had spent some time cautiously bracing themselves for, however no amount of preparation could temper the sting it felt to read that first headline regarding last week’s passing of Raul Malo. The vocal and creative powerhouse, and frontman of The Mavericks, was only sixty years old, ultimately succumbing to colon cancer after a valiant eighteen-month battle with the illness, for which much of it he continued to tour extensively with the Mavs. It’s the sad and premature silencing of one of the most uniquely special and ambitious creative voices of a generation, though his incredibly rich and diverse body of work will live on and continue to entrance and inspire for generations to come.
Writing a memoriam tribute to an artist is not something I participate in frequently on The 706, though it is something that I should improve upon, as there has certainly been no shortage of musical losses within the five years I’ve been writing this blog. (In fact, as I’m typing this I’m now reading that Joe Ely has passed. Damn; RIP Joe.) The only other time I’ve written a full-blown remembrance like this was after the passing of Jimmy Buffett in the Fall of 2023. Like Buffett, Malo’s music was a fixture of my childhood soundtrack, and I carried my love for his music into my adulthood. With my father’s exposing of me to the records of Raul and the Mavericks, he in turn exposed me to a vastly rich well of diverse musical stylings that I wouldn’t come to fully appreciate until years later.
But there was no doubt in my young mind that when my father was spinning this albums, I was soaking in something very special, and these were performances that would ultimately soak into the very fabric of my musical fandom. This is why the concert my dad and I attended together this past March featuring both the Mavericks and Dwight Yoakam, was an especially fun and meaningful night for me. And let me tell you, as I wrote in that concert review, Raul Malo was an absolute force of nature when he performed that night. If you weren’t made aware of his illness, you’d have never suspected the battle for his life that was raging behind the scenes. Add qualities of toughness and tenacity to the long list of attributes that made Raul Malo a certifiable legend.
He truly was one of those incomparable, generational talents. Vocally, both his physical and stylistic range knew no limits. Numerous comparisons of his voice to legends like Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, and Luciano Pavarotti were certainly apt, however just as each of those epic singers possessed their own intangible and indescribable qualities that could never be replicated, so certainly did Malo. In terms of musical genres or styles, there may not be a single one that he did not indulge in and enrich, either through his work with the Mavericks, his indelible run of solo records, or the plentiful collaborations he made with other artists. Malo helped expose new listeners to a kaleidoscope of classic and contemporary sounds, among them traditional country, honky-tonk, classic pop, rock & roll, blues, Bakersfield, polka, county-rock, Western Swing, jazz, operatic pop, as well as the Tex-Mex and Latin sounds tethered to his family’s multi-cultural background.
Theoretically, the scope of his sheer talent, diversity, and musical knowledge should have made him one of the biggest music superstars of his lifetime, and in a just world, they would have. That said, Malo was most certainly an icon, in every sense of the word, and one whose creative influence and popularity will reverberate through future generations of both music-creators and music-lovers. Perhaps this was never more evident that during the two-night run of tribute shows hosted by the Mavericks at the Ryman Auditorium just a few nights before his death. There, his staggering influence and towering body of work was celebrated by a host of admiring fellow-artists including Rodney Crowell, Marty Stuart, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Ray Benson, Chuck Mead, Maggie Rose, Jamey Johnson, Jim Lauderdale, Jimmie Vaughan, Mandy Barnett, Joshua Ray Walker, and many more.
You can rest assured that I will share a column in the future dedicated to my favorite moments in Raul Malo’s and The Mavericks’ respective discographies. They are catalogs so rich that harnessing them into such a compilation is no easy task. Hell, I’m a near-life-long listener of the music and there are still plenty of new and exciting discoveries left for me myself to unearth. And frankly, I still need to reconcile with the fact that there won’t be more music from Malo, as you can rest assured that he still had an extensive amount of creative energy and inspiration left inside of him. I’ll be spending the forthcoming days and weeks simply enjoying the massive canon he did bless us with, and remembering the ultra-rare talent that he truly was.
Rest easy, Raul.
The 706 
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