When guitarist Tony Rice passed away on Christmas Day at his home in North Carolina, bluegrass music said goodbye to a second generation star who expressed his music in modern terms and used the potential of bluegrass to mix both genres and to influence.
“The music industry has lost a real innovator,” says Jimmy Gaudreau, who played mandolin with Rice in the 1980s and 1990s. “As for today’s guitarists, they name Tony Rice as the biggest influence.”
Rice emerged in the vanguard of bluegrass music when he joined orchestra leader JD Crowe in the early 1970s. Crowe rocked up bluegrass music by inviting Rice, a folk music lover, to bring in songs like “Summer Wages” (Ian Tyson) and “You Are What I Am” (Gordon Lightfoot) and generously picking and singing of Rice. and rising star Ricky Skaggs. Together with their boss, Skaggs and Rice form the core of the JD Crowe and the New South album released in 1975. Today lovingly known under the catalog number “0044”, many consider it to be the greatest album ever recorded in bluegrass. It shot to the heights of Crowe’s fast banjo and Skaggs’ joyful tenor singing. But Rice’s solid platforming guitar style and heartbreaking lead vocals anchored the sound.
Many purists sniff at the diverse set of list and freewheeling adaptations of ‘0044’, but 45 years later fans still celebrate the album. This is one of the reasons why bluegrass experiments are freely accepted today.
Rice was born in 1951 to a music-playing family in Danville, Virginia, who raised him in California, Florida, and North Carolina. “He was refined, and he took what Clarence could do and went beyond that,” Gaudreau says.
Beginning in the 1960s, the young guitarist played in a series of regional bands, but his pace accelerated in 1970 when he took over lead singing for the Bluegrass Alliance in Louisville, Kentucky. There was mandolinist Sam Bush and a free marriage with bluegrass and newer musical styles. “Rice was a step above most people who played with the band at the time,” recalls Harry Bickel, a bluegrass music champion in Louisville in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, JD Crowe hired Tony’s older brother Larry to play mandolin. In an interview from his home near Lexington, Kentucky, Crowe said Rolling clip that it did not take long before he also engaged Tony. On Labor Day weekend in 1971, Tony will perform his last concert with the Bluegrass Alliance at the Bluegrass Festival in Camp Springs, North Carolina, which will be filmed by director Albert Ihde for his 1972 documentary. Bluegrass Country Soul. Crowe was also playing the festival and he needed the grinding lead singer just as much as the Bluegrass Alliance. Critical fans of the documentary classic will know that Tony appeared with both bands over the weekend: in paisley with the Bluegrass Alliance and in a stiff white shirt with Crowe.
Rice’s four years at Crowe were like college education. “When he first came with me,” says Crowe, “he tried to play everything he knew in one fell swoop, and I would say to him, ‘Play the melody of the song first. You can have your inserts there, but let the melody stand out first. Timing and melody, this is what you go with. “Nobody ever explained it to him like that. ”
Thanks to their regular performances at the Holiday Inn in Lexington, where they played five nights a week, Crowe’s band developed into a precisely calibrated locomotive. “We were at the point where we knew what each other was thinking by just looking at each other, and it’s a great feeling to have,” Crowe explains. Tony was very good at paying attention, because whatever he plays, he wants it right, as good as he can get it. I loved it because there are so many pickers who don’t feel that way. ”
‘We were not only pickers together, we were also friends. Losing Tony was like losing a brother. ”- JD Crowe
In the wake of the innovative ‘0044’, Rice meets jazz-folk-bluegrass fusionist David Grisman in California. “Grisman came home to Kentucky with me and he played a few nights with the New South, which was the last configuration of the New South I was in,” Rice told author Barry R. Willis. ‘And then, from there, we befriended each other and we started talking on the phone from time to time, just to shoot the breeze more or less. And it was in the summer of that year that we started talking seriously about collaborating on something – whether it was a group project, or a survey, or whatever. ‘
But before leaving for the David Grisman Quintet at the end of 1975, Rice played another concert with Crowe. “Tony has been with me for almost four years and I knew he was getting tired, I could see it,” Crowe says. “And he’s already told me about the move and I said, ‘I hate losing you, but you have to do what you want to do. I appreciate you even mentioning it. I can not blame you. I hate it, but I understand. ‘The last show we did was in Japan, 1975, and I say this: the last song we sang when we walked off stage had tears in his eyes. He could barely talk to me. We were not only pickers together, we were also friends. Losing Tony was like losing a brother. ”
With Grisman, Rice studies music theory and thrives while the orchestra carries his beloved bluegrass into the jazz realm, factors that moved him to go out on his own as the Tony Rice unit in 1979. The orchestra was originally considered an instrumental group, and continues to record several albums for Rounder, including the highly acclaimed 1979 Manzanita, which mixes jazz, folk and bluegrass and features his former orchestra members Ricky Skaggs and Sam Bush.
“I’m a bluegrass musician at heart,” he said. Bluegrass Unlimited in the 1980s, perhaps mindful of those who may have assumed he had given up his roots. ‘But I want to explore and discover a few other things along the way. If I think piano, drums and soprano saxophone are appropriate, I add it. I really wanted to limit myself to one format. But I’m very much a guitar player, but the challenge of the music now lies elsewhere. “
A failed relationship in California points him back to the East, where he reforms the Tony Rice unit with a view to bringing his voice to the fore again. After a series of instrumental albums influenced by jazz, he dusted off his folk-influenced singing for the solo albums Church Street Blues in 1983 and 1984 Cold on the shoulder, the latter with instrumentalists Béla Fleck, Vassar Clements and Jerry Douglas. The larger bluegrass audience got used to progressive bluegrass thanks to bands like New Grass Revival and even the experimentation of JD Crowe, so it was not difficult to sell the experimental elements that became part of Rice’s sound to bluegrass fans. not.
“It was fresh,” says Gaudreau, who joined the unit in the 1980s. “It was, ‘Tony Rice is back and he sings. ‘It was the battle cry around the bluegrass track. “And he has a group that will absolutely send you over the top.” We ran it for a while, but as soon as the word came out, everyone wanted it. Tony was like singing with a vocal machine. He was just spot on, always on the pitch, and never threw curves at you. It was always fast balls. ”
When he became the teacher Crowe and Grisman were to him, Rice made his crew flourish. “It was without a doubt the most instructive experience I had in music,” says Gaudreau. ‘Who knows my instrument better, becomes a more skilled player and develops an appreciation for where music can go, he showed me the way. He showed me that there are ways to play music that are based on tradition, but that you can make your own mark on. Everything on which Tony Rice played and sang, he signed his name. ”
As if to remind the audience of his bluegrass soul, Rice Crowe, tenor singer Doyle Lawson, violinist Bobby Hicks and bassist Todd Phillips gathered in 1981 to make The Bluegrass Album for Rounder. ‘We came halfway through the first album,’ says Crowe, ‘and we were listening to playlist and Tony and I were standing next to each other and he looked at me and said,’ Crowe. This is too good. We can not let it go with one album. We need to do more than one. ” Indeed, the group, which became known as the Bluegrass Album Band, recorded five additional albums, containing the last major chapter in Rice’s recording career.
“But on the fourth album we did, I could see that Tony’s voice was not as good as it used to be,” Crowe continues. ‘Then I noticed that his voice went down slightly. He made an effort to do things he had not tried to do before. In simple terms, years of singing and tobacco and alcohol use have damaged his throat. Doctors call it ‘dysphonia’, and by the mid-1990’s, the Bluegrass Album Band was in full swing with an instrumental collection.
Gaudreau saw Rice’s reckoning with his deteriorating heath during the 1994 Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival, where Rice and Ricky Skaggs and other members of the New South performed a reunion concert. “His voice has already given out,” says Gaudreau. “It was raspy. For a few years, he pushed it harder and harder until it could no longer function. On the particular show, he looked at Ricky and shook his head as he came off the stage. [Fiddler] Rickie Simpkins and I stood there and he walked over to us and in his rasping, growling voice with everything he said about it, ‘I don’t sing anymore.’
Despite his disability and other health problems, Rice continues to play the guitar. He remained a force on the instrument and a guideline for younger players. Fans were never tired of seeing his small pickup truck with North Carolina labels drive into the festival parking lot just before show time.
Sometimes the Bluegrass Album Band performed again for gigs, the last one in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2013. ‘That was after he felt pretty bad, and he did not know if he could get it right or not and they did it. discuss shows like that, ”Crowe recalls. ‘I assisted a guy to help us do Tony’s part if he could not do it. He did well, but I could see that it was not like the Tony I knew. We did the show and we did two encores and when we walked off the stage, he looked at me and said, ‘Crowe, I’m exhausted. These are the words he said. I could know. I said, ‘Tony, you did well. I know you’m tired, but you pulled it off, buddy. He kind of grinned. From there he is downhill. ”
Rice was still calling his old teacher in August for his birthday and whistling his greetings to Crowe when it became too difficult to speak. But Rice did not call this year, and when he rang the day after Christmas, he was not surprised to hear that the body of the innovator had finally let him down.
To this day, Crowe is amazed at Rice’s talent, whether he commands the microphone, chooses a lead on his Martin D-28, or lies graciously while others take a solo. “Tony was probably about my favorite rhythm guitar player. “As far as a singer is concerned, he was the man, in terms of timing and singing and knowing where to put it,” says Crowe. “When he learned it and stayed there, he never forgot it.”