Tony Rice, an immensely influential singer and guitarist in bluegrass and the new circles of acoustic music that grew up around him, died Saturday at his home in Reidsville, NC. He was 69 years old.
The International Bluegrass Music Association confirmed his death. No cause was specified.
“Tony Rice was the king of the flat table guitar,” singer-songwriter Jason Isbell said on Twitter. “Your influence cannot be overstated.”
Isbell was referring to what is commonly known as flatpicking, a technique that involves playing the strings on a guitar with a pick or pick instead of your fingers. Inspired by the strong plot of the pioneer leader of the bluegrass band Jimmy Martin, Mr. Rice’s flatpicking was singularly agile and expressive.
“I don’t know if a person can make something more beautiful,” continued Isbell in his tweet, describing Rice’s percussive and fluid touch, in which the feeling, whether harmonically or melodically expressed, takes precedence over the flash.
Rice left his mark on a number of prominent musicians, including his innovative newgrass colleagues Mark O’Connor and Béla Fleck, heirs of acoustic music like Chris Thile and Alison Krauss, and his disciples Bryan Sutton and Josh Williams.
“There is no way to go back to what it was before,” Krauss said of bluegrass in an interview with The New York Times Magazine for a profile of Rice in 2014. She was just a teenager when Mr. Rice first asked her to go up stage to play with him.
Beginning in the 1970s with his work with the group JD Crowe and New South, Mr. Rice built bridges that spanned traditional bluegrass, 1960s folk songs, jazz improvisation, classical music and pop singer and songwriter.
He was a catalyst for the newgrass movement, in which bands broke with the bluegrass tradition, taking inspiration from pop and rock sources, employing a more improvised approach to performing and incorporating previously unexplored instrumentation such as electric guitar and drums.
The bluegrass association named him the instrumental performer of the year six times, and in 1983 he received a Grammy award for best country instrumental performance for “Fireball”, a track recorded with JD Crowe and New South.
Not only was he a virtuoso guitarist, Mr. Rice was also a talented singer and master of phrasing. His rich and flexible baritone was just as comfortable singing at home in three-part bluegrass harmony arrangements as he was adapting the troubadour ballads Gordon Lightfoot under the newgrass banner.
But his artistic career was abruptly interrupted in early 1994, when he learned that he had muscle tension dysphonia, a severe vocal disorder that deprived him of the ability to sing in public and compromised his voice. He would not sing on stage or speak to the public again until 2013, when the bluegrass association introduced him to the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame.
Shortly after that diagnosis, Rice discovered that he also had lateral epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, which made it very painful for him to play guitar in public.
David Anthony Rice was born on June 8, 1951, in Danville, Va., One of the four boys of Herbert Hoover Rice and Dorothy (Poindexter) Rice, who was known as Louise. His father was a welder and an amateur musician; his mother, worker and housewife. It was her idea to call her son Tony, in honor of her favorite actor, Tony Curtis. Everyone at Rice’s house played or sang bluegrass music.
After the family moved to the Los Angeles area in the mid-1950s, Rice’s father formed a bluegrass band called Golden State Boys. The group, which recorded several singles, included two of his mother’s brothers, as well as a young Del McCoury at one point, before he became a master of bluegrass on his own merits. The band inspired Rice and his brothers to form their own bluegrass group, the Haphazards.
The Haphazards sometimes shared local accounts with the Kentucky Colonels, a band whose stunning guitarist Clarence White – a future member of the rock band The Byrds – had a profound influence on Rice’s early development as a musician.
(Mr. White was killed by a drunk driver while loading equipment after a show in 1973. Subsequently, Mr. Rice tracked Mr. White’s 1935 Martin D-28 herringbone guitar, which he bought from its new owner in 1975 for $ 550. Restoring the guitar, he started playing with it, affectionately calling it “Old”.)
The Rice family moved from California to Florida in 1965 and then to several cities in the southeast, where Mr. Rice’s father sought one welding opportunity after another.
He also drank, creating a tumultuous family life that forced Mr. Rice to move when he was 17. Tony Rice also struggled with alcohol, but he said he had been sober since 2001.
Leaving high school, Mr. Rice jumped between relatives’ homes before moving to Louisville in 1970 to join the Bluegrass Alliance. Band members, including mandolin player Sam Bush, formed a large part of the founding nucleus of the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival.
Mr. Rice joined JD Crowe and New South in 1971. Three years later, Mr. Skaggs also signed up, replacing Mr. Rice’s brother, Larry in the group. Double player Jerry Douglas also became a member of New South at this time. In 1975, the band released an album simply titled “JD Crowe and the New South” (but commonly known for their first track, “Old Home Place”), which modernized bluegrass in ways that shaped music in the 21st century.
Rice, Douglas and Skaggs left the group in August 1975. Rice then moved to San Francisco and helped found the David Grisman Quartet, a pioneering ensemble with bluegrass instrumentation that fused classical and jazz sensibility to create what Mr. Grisman called it “dawg music”.
“The music placed before me was unlike anything I had ever seen,” Rice told The Times Magazine in 2014. “At first, I thought I couldn’t learn. The only thing that saved me was that I always loved the sound of modern acoustic jazz in small groups. “
After four years with Grisman, Mr. Rice established his own group, the Tony Rice Unit, which was acclaimed for its experimental and jazz-permeated approach to bluegrass, heard on albums like “Manzanita” (1979) and “Mar West” (1980).
Mr. Rice also recorded more mainstream and traditional material for several other projects, including a series of six-volume albums that honored the formative bluegrass of the 1950s.
“Skaggs & Rice” (1980), another album with a history, featured Skaggs and Rice singing perfect and exciting harmonies in honor of the pre-bluegrass era duo of brothers.
Most of Rice’s releases after 1994, the year she was diagnosed with vocal disorder, were instrumental projects or collaborations, such as “The Pizza Tapes”, a studio album with Grisman and Jerry Garcia from the famous Grateful Dead; Mr. Rice contributed to the guitar.
His survivors include his 30-year-old wife, Pamela Hodges Rice, and his brothers Ron and Wyatt. Her brother Larry died in 2006.
Mr. Rice was a dashing figure on stage, complete with finely cut suits and a dignified demeanor, as if to contradict the lack of respect that bluegrass sometimes received outside the South, due to its difficult rural start.
Mr. Rice was as aware of these cultural dynamics as he was of the limitless possibilities he saw in bluegrass music.
“Perhaps the reason why I dress like this goes back to the day when, if you went out into the street, unless you had some sort of digging job to do, you made an effort not to look like a slob,” he told his colleagues. biographers, Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, for “Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story” (2010).
“At the height of Miles Davis’ most famous bands, you wouldn’t have seen Miles without a tailored suit,” he continued. “My musical heroes wear suits.”