Not every community has a hearty pirate in its midst, so if you’re lucky enough to have one, remember to appreciate him, because one day the pirate could be gone, and you’ll realize how much you lost. The East Nashville music scene lost its pirate on Aug. 31, when Tom Mason passed away in his home town of Minneapolis after a battle with cancer at the age of 65.
Mason, a beloved and ubiquitous figure in Music City, was a singer and songwriter, a guitarist and trombone player, a thespian and raconteur. He was the founder and leader of the long-running band the Blue Buccaneers, which released six albums and toured widely, landing Tom, this spring, in the International Pirate Hall of Fame, alongside Johnny Depp and Errol Flynn.
Dozens of friends and colleagues have posted fond memories of Tom over the past ten days, noting his ebullience and heart on and off stage.
“I can't emphasize enough that word joy,” says his longtime friend and bandmate Eric Brace. “Tom just made it look like he was having so much fun whenever he played, and it wasn't an act. He was there to be an entertainer. It was his job to entertain. He wanted to give people an escape. And yes, that included some absolutely first class songs, but he fully embraced that Let's Put On A Show (idea). He never shied away from putting on a costume, whether it was a pirate costume or a tomato costume. Just make them smile.”
That extended to the theatrical stage. Mason played a number of roles with the Actors Bridge Ensemble and the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, including a celebrated turn as Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night, for which he wrote original music. Denice Hicks, the local legend who recently retired as artistic director of the Shakespeare festival, told me that Tom brought “what every director dreams of to every stage appearance - energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, creativity, and most importantly, character. What a wonderful character he was. And he always put in all the work, and then he had a ball doing whatever role I tasked him with.”
That Feste role in 2021 came after he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and he was in treatment during the run of the play. “He was performing while he was getting chemo,” Hicks told WMOT. “He'd get the actual treatment on the dark Monday, and then he'd be in rehearsal the next day. He said then that he only felt well while he was either rehearsing or performing, and all the rest of the time he just felt horrible.” Yet to see him during that stretch, you’d never know it from his resilient good spirit.
Mason was born on Feb. 7, 1959 and completed high school in Roseville, MN between the twin cities. He was the youngest of five children in “a family that loved words and music,” according to his obituary in the Minnesota Star Tribune. He was, said the indie paper MinnPost, “a fixture on the Twin Cities rock scene throughout the 80s, playing with Paul Westerberg (of the Replacements) in their short-lived pop outfit Rock Island, touring with songwriter/guitarist Jeff Waryan in Figures, and gigging with his own bands Dream Diesel, The Kingpins, and Mile One.”
After a stay in Chicago, Mason moved in 1993 to Nashville, where he found community and collaborators. He released his solo debut Where Shadows Fall in 1998 and became a fixture at the late, great clubs Radio Cafe and the Family Wash and later the 5 Spot. One of his champions was Eric Brace, who remembers meeting Tom at a guitar pull hosted by the late author Robert Hicks. Brace tapped Mason’s song “Ramblin’” for the inaugural release of his Red Beet Records label - an album that helped put the 37206 music scene on the national map - the 2006 collection The Other Side: Music From East Nashville. Around the same time, Mason and his then wife Pru Clearwater formed the band The Big Happy with impresario Billy Block and his wife Jill, releasing a self titled album.
Between 2009 and 2014, Mason joined Brace’s band Last Train Home as a guitarist, harmony singer, and sometime trombone player. “We probably played 100 gigs together, and it was never not a joy, especially when we went to the Virgin Islands a couple of times. We had a string of dates down there. Tom came down with us, and I think that's where he fully embraced his inner pirate.”
Mason was already diving into pirate history, building up an extensive personal library on the subject, and writing “The Pirate Song,” which he released on his 2008 solo album Alchemy. When Mason landed a role in the national tour of the Broadway musical Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash, that song became a hit at after-show parties and jams.
“My cast-mates convinced me to start writing a musical, and I began devouring all the books and source material I could find,” Mason told the Lonesome Highway blog in 2011. “As I wrote more and more songs for the project I realized how much fun they’d be to play with a band.”
He didn’t finish a musical, but his passion became Tom Mason and the Blue Buccaneers in 2011, an impressively costumed collective that toured the surprisingly extensive circuit of pirate and maritime festivals in the US and abroad. When Mason was inducted into the International Pirate Hall of Fame last spring, the organization cited his six pirate albums and his success as a songwriter in that vibrant society. Blue Buccaneers songs “are being performed by shanty groups and pirate bands around the world,” they said.
In 2017, Mason married Whitney Davis, who cared for him during his struggles and eventual passing in hospice. Mason’s obituary notes that contributions and memorials “may be directed to the Music Health Alliance, Nashville, which provided him critical support during his illness, or to Tom's Gofundme for necessary costs to complete his final album. A memorial gathering will be held at a later date.”
