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Tony Rice

Musician · 1951–2020 · Danville, Virginia · Also a recording artist
Best known for Guitar Lead Vocals

Tony Rice was the most influential bluegrass and acoustic guitarist of the modern era, a flatpicker whose liquid tone, jazz-schooled phrasing, and rhythmic authority remade the instrument as a lead voice equal to the fiddle and banjo. His warm baritone anchored some of the most consequential albums in the music’s history, and the vocabulary he built on Clarence White’s battered 1935 Martin became the common tongue of nearly every flatpicker who followed. From the newgrass ferment of the 1970s to the acoustic mainstream he helped create, Rice stands as a founding architect of contemporary bluegrass.

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  • Born David Anthony Rice on June 8, 1951, in Danville, Virginia, he grew up largely around Los Angeles, where his father, mandolinist Herb Rice, and uncle Hal Poindexter of the Golden State Boys steeped the family in bluegrass. He debuted on radio around age nine on California’s Town Hall Party, and his brothers — Larry (mandolin), Wyatt (guitar), and Ronnie (bass) — became lifelong musical partners.
  • As a teenager Rice met guitarist Clarence White of the Kentucky Colonels, whose driving, syncopated flatpicking became the single defining influence on his playing; over the following decades he expanded White’s approach from a set of licks into a complete lead-guitar language.
  • He apprenticed in youth groups including the Haphazards and Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party before turning professional, and in 1970 he moved to Louisville to join the Bluegrass Alliance, replacing flatpicker Dan Crary in one of the era’s pioneering progressive outfits.
  • From 1971 to 1975 Rice held the guitar and lead-vocal chair in J.D. Crowe and the New South, working six nights a week in Lexington, Kentucky lounges alongside a young Ricky Skaggs (mandolin and fiddle), Dobro innovator Jerry Douglas, and bassist Bobby Slone.
  • The band’s 1975 album J.D. Crowe and the New South (Rounder 0044) proved so influential that musicians still call it simply “Rounder 0044”; its polished blend of tradition and contemporary song choices became a template for a generation of progressive bluegrass.
  • In 1975 Rice acquired Clarence White’s 1935 Martin D-28 — serial number 58957, its soundhole enlarged by an earlier owner — the instrument he played for the rest of his life, its worn, cannon-like voice becoming inseparable from his own.
  • Later in 1975 he moved to California to join the all-instrumental David Grisman Quintet, whose landmark 1977 debut fused bluegrass technique with swing and jazz into the style Grisman dubbed “Dawg music,” pushing Rice’s improvising far beyond bluegrass convention.
  • In 1978 he launched the Tony Rice Unit to pursue his own jazz-inflected direction, sometimes called “spacegrass,” across albums such as Acoustics (1978), Mar West (1980), Still Inside (1981), and Backwaters (1982), with sidemen including brother Wyatt Rice, Jimmy Gaudreau, Todd Phillips, and John Reischman.
  • His 1979 album Manzanita, cut with Skaggs, Douglas, Sam Bush, and David Grisman, restored a full bluegrass vocal format at the peak of his singing powers and is widely regarded as one of the finest bluegrass records of its decade.
  • In 1980 he co-founded the Bluegrass Album Band, a traditionalist supergroup with banjoist J.D. Crowe, mandolinist Doyle Lawson, fiddler Bobby Hicks, and bassist Todd Phillips; across six volumes for Rounder between 1981 and 1996 it became a defining reference for hard-driving traditional repertoire.
  • His 1983 solo album Church Street Blues (Sugar Hill), built around just his voice and guitar, is a touchstone of the singer-guitarist form, and its Norman Blake–penned title track became one of his signature performances.
  • A distinctive interpreter of songwriters far outside bluegrass, Rice recorded material by Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton, Ian Tyson, and Phil Ochs, bringing a folk sensibility to albums such as Cold on the Shoulder (1984), Me & My Guitar (1986), and Native American (1988).
  • He made landmark duo and small-group records including Skaggs & Rice (1980) with Ricky Skaggs, Blake & Rice (1987) and its 1990 sequel with Norman Blake, four projects with banjoist Béla Fleck (among them Drive, 1988), and three albums as Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen (1997–2001) with brother Larry Rice, Chris Hillman, and Herb Pedersen.
  • His recorded work earned a Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance for the New South tune “Fireball” in 1983, a rare crossover honor for a bluegrass instrumentalist.
  • The International Bluegrass Music Association named him Guitar Player of the Year six times — 1990, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1997, and 2007 — and honored his bands with Instrumental Group of the Year for the Bluegrass Album Band (1990) and the Tony Rice Unit (1991 and 1995).
  • In 1994 Rice was diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia, a disorder that forced him to stop singing; he carried on as a purely instrumental performer until a later diagnosis of lateral epicondylitis (“tennis elbow”) around 2014 made playing painful and effectively ended his career.
  • He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2013, and his brief, emotional appearance at the ceremony — where he spoke about his lost voice — proved to be his final public performance.
  • Tony Rice died at home in Reidsville, North Carolina, on Christmas Day, December 25, 2020, at age 69.
  • His playing reshaped the instrument for virtually every flatpicker who followed, from Bryan Sutton and Chris Eldridge to contemporary stars Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings, and he is widely regarded as the most influential acoustic guitarist in modern bluegrass; in 2022 the Punch Brothers devoted their album Hell on Church Street, a track-by-track reimagining of Church Street Blues, to his memory.
  • The authorized biography Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story (Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, 2010) chronicled a body of work that carried bluegrass guitar from a supporting rhythm role to a fully realized solo art.

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