RIP Joe Mauldin Of Buddy Holly And The Crickets

posted in: Music News

Joe Mauldin, the bass player for one of the most influential early rock and roll bands, died on Saturday February 7th after a battle with cancer, Billboard reports. Mauldin played double bass in the Crickets, off-and-on backing band for Buddy Holly before his death in a plane crash in 1959.

Listening to Mauldin’s playing on those early records, it sounds familiar – almost archetypical – and thus perhaps less unique to modern listeners some 60 years later. But this of course is because he helped create the sound and style that became the bedrock for the then-new hybrid of rhythm and blues and pop that Holly was ushering in. While the double bass itself would not be in vogue for much longer, Holly and the Crickets influenced the biggest rock acts of the next decade, and they, in turn, shaped modern music as we know it today.

After Holly’s death, Mauldin continued to perform with the Crickets, who had already begun recording without their former frontman, who had moved to New York from their home in Texas. The band backed the Everly Brothers on tour before Mauldin enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving from 1964-66. He later became a recording engineer at the famed Gold Star Studios and, in 2012, was inducted with the rest of the Crickets – Jerry Allison, Sonny Curtis, and Niki Sullivan – into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.