Don Maddox, pioneering musician, dies at 98

Don Maddox, the last surviving member of the Maddox Brothers & Rose, the lively sibling band that helped give rise to West Coast honky-tonk, rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll, died Sept. 12 in an adult care facility in Medford, Oregon. He was 98.

His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his wife of 11 years, Barbara Harvey-Maddox, who said he had been suffering from dementia.

Hailed in the 1940s and ’50s as America’s “most colorful hillbilly band,” the Maddox Brothers & Rose were renowned for their exuberant fusion of barnyard twang and gutbucket R&B, as well as for their uproarious antics onstage. The fringed, embroidered costumes they wore — designed by Hollywood rodeo tailor Nathan Turk — were equally dazzling, a harbinger of the Western resplendence sported by Buck Owens in the 1960s and later by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Owens’ lean, hard-driving Bakersfield sound owed a debt to the Maddoxes’ rollicking hillbilly boogie, propelled as it was by the instinctive thwacking by Maddox’s eldest brother, Fred, on upright bass. The early rockabilly of Elvis Presley also was influenced, notably by the slapping technique of his bass player, Bill Black, who idolized Fred Maddox.

The Maddox sound “was born from that slap bass,” Don Maddox said of his brother Fred’s style in an interview for Ken Burns’ multipart 2019 PBS documentary “Country Music.”

“Fred didn’t know what the notes were. He just slapped it for rhythm,” Maddox said. “We didn’t call it ‘rockabilly.’ We called it ‘Okie boogie.’ ”

Maddox played fiddle, in a sawing down-home mode, and provided backing vocals; his sister, Rose, was the lead vocalist. The other members were his older brothers Cliff and Cal on guitars and his younger brother, Henry, on mandolin.

Rose Maddox died in 1998, Cliff in 1949, Cal in 1968, Henry in 1974 and Fred in 1992.

The account of how the Maddoxes made it to California rivaled the story of their rise within the ranks of West Coast country music — a Depression-era narrative as emblematic as “The Grapes of Wrath.”

In 1933, forced by drought to abandon their life of subsistence farming in rural Alabama, Don Maddox and his family — his sharecropper parents, Charlie and Lula (Smith) Maddox, and his five siblings — headed west, hitchhiking and riding in the boxcars of freight trains, in search of a better life. Maddox was 10 at the time.

The family picked fruit in migrant labor camps in California, where they squatted in, among other places, the large concrete drainage cylinders found in construction yards in the industrial part of Oakland known as “Pipe City.”

Quickly fed up with their hardscrabble life, Fred Maddox persuaded the owner of a furniture store to sponsor regular performances by him and his brothers on a radio station in Modesto. The only proviso was that the band, which at the time included only Fred, Cliff and Cal, feature a female singer, a role fulfilled with preternatural command by the 11-year-old Rose.

Two years later, having changed their name from the Alabama Outlaws to the Maddox Brothers & Rose, the group won a competition at the California State Fair that included a two-year contract to perform on radio shows broadcast on KFBK in Sacramento.