Tony Rice, an extremely influential singer and guitarist in bluegrass and in the new acoustic music circles that grew up around there, died Saturday at his home in Reidsville, NC. He was 69.
The International Bluegrass Music Association has confirmed his death. No cause was specified.
“Tony Rice was the king of flat-picked flat guitar,” singer-songwriter Jason Isbell said said on Twitter. “His influence is impossible to overestimate.”
Mr. Isbell referred to what is commonly known as flatpicking, a technique that strikes the strings of a guitar with a pick or plectrum instead of with the fingers. Inspired by the powerful work of the pioneering work of bluegrass orchestra leader Jimmy Martin, was mr. Rice’s flat screenshot is exceptionally fast and expressive.
“I do not know if anyone can make something more beautiful,” said Mr. Isbell said in his tweet and the flowing, percussive play of mr. Rice describes in which the feeling, whether harmoniously or melodically expressed, takes precedence over flash. .
Mr. Rice has left his mark on a number of prominent musicians, including his fellow innovators Mark O’Connor and Béla Fleck, heirs of acoustic music such as Chris Thile and Alison Krauss, and his disciples Bryan Sutton and Josh Williams.
“There’s never a way it can go back to what it was before him,” she said. Krauss said about bluegrass in an interview with The New York Times Magazine for a profile of Mr. Rice in 2014. She was barely a teenager when Mr. Rice first invites her on stage to play with him.
From the 1970s with his work with the group JD Crowe and the New South, Mr. Rice bridges built covering traditional bluegrass, 60s folk songs, jazz improvisation, classical music and singer-songwriter pop.
He was a catalyst for the newgrass movement, breaking ties with the bluegrass tradition by using pop and rock sources for inspiration, with a more improvisational approach to performing and using previously unused instrumentation such as electric guitar and drums .
The bluegrass association named him instrumental artist 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 the New South.
Not just a virtuoso guitar player, was mr. Rice is also a gifted singer and master of phrasing. His rich, supple baritone was equally at home starring in blue-grass harmony arrangements, such as adapting Gordon Lightfoot’s troubadour ballads under the new grass banner.
But his executive career was suddenly short in 1994, when he learned that he had dysphonia in muscle tension, a severe vocal disorder that robbed him of the ability to sing in public and jeopardized his speaking voice. He first sang on stage or addressed an audience until 2013, when the bluegrass association inducted him into the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame.
Not long after the diagnosis, Mr. Rice learns that he also had lateral epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, which made it too painful for him to play more guitar in public as well.
David Anthony Rice was born on June 8, 1951 in Danville, Va., One of four sons of Herbert Hoover Rice and Dorothy (Poindexter) Rice, known as Louise. His father was a welder and an amateur musician, his mother was a worker and a homemaker. It was her idea to name her son Tony after her favorite actor, Tony Curtis. Everyone in the Rice household played or sang bluegrass music.
After the family moved to the Los Angeles area in the mid-fifties, Mr. Rice’s father founded a bluegrass group called the Golden State Boys. The group, which recorded several singles, at one point included two of his mother’s brothers as well as a young Del McCoury, before becoming a bluegrass master in his own right. The group has Mr. Rice and his brothers inspired to create their own bluegrass outfit, the Haphazards.
The Haphazards sometimes shared local accounts with the Kentucky Colonels, an orchestra whose brilliant guitarist Clarence White – a future member of the rock band Byrds – had a profound influence on Mr. Rice’s early development as a musician.
(Mr White was killed by a drunk driver while loading equipment after a show in 1973. Afterwards, Mr Rice tracked down Mr White’s 1935 Martin D-28 herringbone guitar, which he bought in 1975 for $ 550. bought his new owner the guitar, he started performing with it and lovingly called it the ‘Antique’.)
The Rice family moved from California to Florida in 1965 and then to various cities in the Southeast, where Mr. Rice’s father pursued one after another welding opportunity.
He also drank, which created a turbulent home life that Mr. Rice was forced to move out when he was 17 years old. Tony Rice himself struggled with alcohol, but according to his account, he has been sober since 2001.
When he left high school, Mr. Rice bounced between family members’ homes before moving to Louisville in 1970 to join the Bluegrass Alliance. The group’s members, including mandolinist Sam Bush, continued to form a core of the progressive bluegrass group New Grass Revival.
Mr. Rice joined JD Crowe and the New South in 1971. Three years later, Mr. Skaggs also signed and replaced Mr Rice’s brother Larry in the group. Dobro player Jerry Douglas is also currently joining the New South. In 1975, the band released an album titled “JD Crowe and the New South” (but widely known for its first track, “Old Home Place”), which modernized bluegrass in a way that made music into the 21st century formed.
Mr. Rice, mr. Douglas and Mr. Skaggs left the group in August 1975. Mr. Rice then moved to San Francisco and helped found the David Grisman Quartet, a groundbreaking ensemble with bluegrass instrumentation that fused classical and jazz sensibilities to create what Mr. Grisman called it “dawg music.”
“The music that was laid out in front of me was like nothing I had ever seen before,” he said. Rice told The Times Magazine in 2014. “At first I thought I could not learn it. The only thing that saved me was that I always loved the sound of acoustic, small group, modern jazz. ”
After four years with mr. Grisman called Mr. Rice formed his own group, the Tony Rice unit, which was praised for its experimental, jazz-soaked approach to bluegrass as heard on albums such as “Manzanita” (1979) and “Mar West” (1980).
Mr. Rice has also recorded more general and traditional material for numerous other projects, including a series of six-part albums that paid homage to the formative bluegrass of the 1950s.
“Skaggs & Rice” (1980), another history-conscious album, features Mr. Skaggs and Mr. Rice singing seamless, soulful harmonies in homage to the fraternal duos found in the pre-bluegrass era.
Most of Mr. Rice’s releases after 1994, the year he received his diagnosis of voice disorder, were instrumental projects or collaborations, such as ‘The Pizza Tapes’, a studio album with Mr. Grisman and Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead fame; Mr. Rice contributed acoustic guitars.
His survivors include his wife of thirty years, Pamela Hodges Rice, and his brothers Ron and Wyatt. His brother Larry passed away in 2006.
Mr. Rice has carved a flashy figure on stage, complete with finely tailored suits and a dignified wear, as if he owes the lack of respect that bluegrass sometimes gained outside the South, thanks to his difficult rural beginnings.
Mr. Rice was as aware of this cultural dynamic as of the limitless possibilities he saw in bluegrass music.
“Perhaps the reason I dress like me went back to the day you, when you were on the street, made an effort not to look like a slob unless you had some kind of ditch digging.” told his biographers, Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, for “Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story” (2010).
“In the heyday of Miles Davis’ most famous bands, you would not have seen Miles without a custom suit,” he continued. “My musical heroes wear suits.”