Tony Rice
A bluegrass flatpicking guitarist and baritone singer who played with J. D. Crowe, David Grisman and his own Tony Rice Unit, and whose 1983 solo album Church Street Blues is often called his masterpiece.
Danville to Louisville
David Anthony Rice was born on June 8, 1951 in Danville, Virginia, and grew up mostly in Los Angeles after a childhood of moves through Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina. His father, Herb Rice, played mandolin and taught four sons: Larry on mandolin, Wyatt on guitar, Ronnie on bass, and Tony. At nine, in 1960, he met Clarence White, who let him try his 1935 Martin D-28; Rice bought that guitar in 1975, and it is known by its serial number, 58957.
Sam Bush brought him into Bluegrass Alliance around 1970 after hearing him at a campfire at Carlton Haney's festival in Reidsville, North Carolina. He then moved to Louisville to join J. D. Crowe and the New South, with Crowe on banjo, Jerry Douglas on dobro and, from 1974, Ricky Skaggs on fiddle and mandolin; their acoustic album of 1974 was Rounder's best seller to that date, and a New South track, "Fireball", won a Grammy for best country instrumental performance in 1983.
Grisman, the Unit and the Album Band
He joined the David Grisman Quintet for its 1977 debut, formed the Tony Rice Unit in the late 1970s with Jimmy Gaudreau, Wyatt Rice, Ronnie Simpkins and later John Reischman and Rickie Simpkins, and left Grisman in 1979. The Unit's music, which he sometimes called spacegrass, produced Manzanita (1979), Mar West (1980), Still Inside (1981), Backwaters (1982) and Unit of Measure (2000). He made Skaggs and Rice with Ricky Skaggs in 1980, four albums with Bela Fleck, records with Norman Blake and the Rice Brothers, and six volumes with the Bluegrass Album Band (1980-1996) alongside Crowe, Bobby Hicks, Doyle Lawson and Todd Phillips. In 1993 he recorded The Pizza Tapes with Grisman and Jerry Garcia, released in 2000.
He won the International Bluegrass Music Association's guitar player or instrumental performer award in 1990, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2007, and entered its Hall of Fame in 2013, where he gave his last live performance on guitar. Ricky Skaggs called him the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years; Jason Isbell called him the king of the flatpicked flattop guitar; and Chris Eldridge of Punch Brothers was among his students. The authorized biography Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story, by Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, appeared in 2010. He died on December 25, 2020 at home in Reidsville, North Carolina, aged 69.
Albums
- Church Street Blues 1983 · Sugar Hill
His 1983 solo album of guitar and voice: twelve songs from Norman Blake, Bob Dylan, Ralph McTell, Gordon Lightfoot and the tradition.
- Native American 1988 · Rounder
His 1988 album of songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Phil Ochs and others, with Vassar Clements, Jerry Douglas and Mary Chapin Carpenter.
Songs
- Church Street Blues Church Street Blues · 1983
Norman Blake's song, the opening track and title of Rice's 1983 album.
- Shadows Native American · 1988
A Gordon Lightfoot song from 1982, taken up by Rice on Native American and again on his Lightfoot album.
Sources
- Tony Rice, Wikipedia
- Tony Rice obituary, Premier Guitar
- Towering bluegrass legend Tony Rice has died, Saving Country Music
- Tony Rice, IBMA