Raul Malo, Miami’s hometown country music hero, died yesterday at sixty years of age. His band the Mavericks had three top-ten albums on the country music charts and a 1995 Grammy for “Best Country Performance”. Just last weekend, the Mavericks hosted a two-night tribute concert for Malo, who had been suffering from cancer, at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium, featuring a who’s who of Americana music, including Steve Earle and Jim Lauderdale. All this fame, respect, and international success came after Malo and the rest of the Mavericks moved to Nashville in 1992, but he got his start right here in Miami.
Last March, Malo spoke to New Times about growing up in Miami, including first learning to play music with others at Rockway Middle School in Westchester. “They had a full orchestra at a public school. Can you imagine that?” he said. “In seventh grade, I was playing double bass with a symphony. That first year, we sounded like a herd of cats. By eighth grade, we sounded pretty good.”
In 1989, he started the Mavericks, whose first ever show was at Churchill’s, 36 years to the day of his death on December 8, 1989. They had all kinds of influences from country and Latin music, but Malo insisted, “The Mavericks at its core is a rock ‘n’ roll band. That’s always been our attitude, even if we throw jazz, big band, and Cuban music into our gumbo.”…