Tony Rice Unit

Spacegrass

The Tony Rice Unit was the band vehicle of the guitarist David Anthony Rice, born June 8, 1951 in Danville, Virginia, who died on December 25, 2020 in Reidsville, North Carolina, aged 69. Wikipedia describes it as his outlet for experimental spacegrass after the Bluegrass Album Band period. Its start date is disputed in the sources we found: 1978 on Deezer and 1979 from the Wilkes Heritage Museum. Rice joined David Grisman's quintet in 1977, left it in 1979 to release Acoustics, and formed the Bluegrass Album Band in 1980. Wikipedia lists Manzanita (1979) among the Unit records.

The line-up shifted from record to record. Mar West (1980, Rounder) had Rice with Sam Bush and Mike Marshall on mandolin, Richard Greene on violin and Todd Phillips on bass. Still Inside (1981) had John Reischman on mandolin, Fred Carpenter on violin and Phillips on bass, and Backwaters (1982) added Wyatt Rice on guitar. Unit of Measure (October 31, 2000) had Tony and Wyatt Rice, Jimmy Gaudreau on mandolin, Rickie Simpkins on fiddle and Ronnie Simpkins on bass. At the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on June 23, 1985 the band was Tony and Wyatt Rice, Gaudreau and Phillips. Wikipedia says Alison Krauss played with the group in concert for about a year in the late 1980s but never recorded with them. The IBMA named it Instrumental Group of the Year in 1991 and 1995, and Rice entered the IBMA Hall of Fame in 2013.

Ricky Skaggs called Rice the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years, and the Punch Brothers' Hell on Church Street paid tribute to him. Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story, an authorized biography, appeared in 2010. Backwaters was reissued on vinyl and remastered by Craft Recordings in 2025.