The late violist on the Beatles’ last track

The Times has an obituary today for Caroline Buckman, one of a dozen or so session musicians who played on the final Beatles’ track, Now and Then. Although Paul McCartney attended the sessions last year, the musicians did not know what it was they were playing for.

Sadly, Caroline Buckman died eight months ago on March 3, not knowing that she was a Beatles player. She was 48 years old and had been struggling with breast cancer since 2017.

A psychiatry professor’s daughter from Charlottesville, Viriginia, Caroline obtained a master’s in viola performance from the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden in 2001. The following year she moved out to Los Angeles, freelancing with various orchestras including Santa Barbara, Pasadena and the Long Beach and Santa Barbara Operas, as well as working in pop and rock sessions. Her credits included TV shows – Mad Men, Breaking Bad – and blockbuster movie: Star Wars, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible.

Caroline’s father, John Buckman, who died in 2010, was born in Warsaw, served in the (British) Royal Army Medical Corps and graduated from Kings College, London, working in the pioneering Marlborough Day Hospital before migrating in 1966 to Virginia. In 1977, Dr. Buckman was a visiting professor of psychiatry at the Charité Hospital in East Berlin in the German Democratic Republic.

Her mother, Erika Buckman, found out last week from a media reporter that her daughter was on a Beatles record. She told CBC: ‘She would have been delirious [with joy] about it.’ Caroline came away with a score signed by Paul McCartney.